A new study by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has found that women and girls made up just 30% of the leading film roles in the top-major motion pictures of 2023, representing a 14 percentage point drop from the year before. The trend extended to women and other underrepresented groups both in front of and behind the camera, revealing an overall stagnation in inclusion efforts in the movie industry.
Women-Led Films Fell Close To 30% In 2023, Near A 10-Year Low, Per Study
Only 32% of a total of 5,084 speaking characters in 2023’s top films were girls/women, according to the annual study, which tracked 1,700 movies, while 68.2% were male and less than 1% were non binary. The girls/women number dipped to its lowest percentage since 2007, the first year of the USC study. The number of female directors, composers, writers and producers were also flat with 2022.
The report also found that only 11% of 2023’s top 100 movies were gender-balanced, meaning women/girls in about half of all speaking roles, also a number even with 2007.
“No matter how you examine the data, 2023 was not the ‘Year of the Woman.’ We continue to report the same trends for girls and women on screen, year in and year out,” said Annenberg Inclusion Initiative head Dr. Stacy L. Smith in the report, titled “Inequality in 1,700 Popular Films.” “It is clear that there is either a dismissal of women as an audience for more than one or two films per year, a refusal to find ways to create meaningful change, or both. If the industry wants to survive its current moment, it must examine its failure to employ half the population on screen.”
The trend continued for other underrepresented groups in 2023’s top 100 films: 1.2% of all speaking characters were LGBTQ+, flat with 2014, while only 3% of leads/co-leads were aged 45 or older and only 2.2% of speaking or named characters were depicted with a disability.
Another notable stat: Across more than 9,000 characters evaluated and 200 top movies, there was not one transgender character who spoke or was named on screen in either 2014 or 2023.
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Among racial/ethnic groups, there were no significant changes since 2007, though the percentage of white characters decreased significantly, (from 78% to 56%) while the percentage of Asian characters grew (from 3% to 18%). Overall, the study finds, the percentage of underrepresented characters (44%) was similar to the percentage of the U.S. population that identifies with an underrepresented racial/ethnic group (41.1%).
Still, in 2023 there were 99 films missing both American Indian/Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander girls/women, 81 missing a Middle Eastern/North African female-identified character, 62 were missing Hispanic/Latinas, 56 a Multiracial/Multiethnic girl or woman, 49 an Asian girl/woman and 39 were missing girls and women who were Black/African American. Of that 100, 12 movies did not include any white girls/women on screen.
The numbers were similar for those groups in behind-the-camera positions.
“The recipe for creating inclusion does not change from year to year,” said Smith. “We have advocated for the solutions in the report for several years, but unless executives and other decision-makers listen and make different choices, we will not see different results. U.S. state legislatures have taken aim against DEI, and the entertainment industry seems either too apathetic or too fearful to use the tools in their arsenal to reflect back to its consumers the world that exists rather than a skewed representation of the population.”
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