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Dory, Ellen DeGeneres' forgetful fish in Finding Nemo, would have to swim the seven seas to find another female who utters even a few lines in the film -- and she's not alone, a University of Southern California study reports today.
The study finds that female roles are rare in children's movies, including Nemo, the 2003 mega-hit, and last year's Madagascar, among others. And those with balanced male-female casts are exceedingly rare, accounting for only seven of the 101 top-grossing G-rated films released from 1990 to 2004.
For every speaking female character, the study finds, there are three male characters.
The figures are similar to those of a USA TODAY study in 2002 that analyzed all films widely released in 2001. It found that males made up 65% of all roles and 75% of starring roles.
The new research was backed by actress Geena Davis, a mother of three who notes that many female characters in G-rated films these days are "wonderful" role models -- Mulan comes to mind. But Davis says such roles are still too rare. And that hurts boys as well as girls, she says.
"To just continually see worlds where girls are sidelined or don't exist or are very peripheral to what's going on, they sort of grow up realizing that they can just discount girls and that they don't have to be interested in what girls do."
Davis won a Golden Globe playing the first female U.S. president in the TV show Commander in Chief.
Many recent G-rated films are animated comedies, and most animators, historically, have been men. Perhaps it just comes naturally that they think of male characters as funny. "We grew up in that environment, so consequently we don't really notice it," Davis says. "It's not something that we're hard-wired to pick up on, because it's so part of what we grew up with, that boys are doing the interesting things."
Joe Kelly, president of Dads and Daughters, a foundation that sponsored the research, agrees. "I don't think it's part of any vast sexist conspiracy -- I just think it's inertia."
Actually, the study found that since 1990, the gap has gotten worse. In the first five years of films studied, from 1990 to 1994, 66.7% of primary characters in G-rated movies were male. From 1995 to 1999, it jumped to 78.9%. From 2000 to 2004 it was 77.4%.
Entertainment Tonight film critic Leonard Maltin says gender "is not always the point of identification" in a movie. "I'm not sure that it's a requirement that a story have a balance in order to have a positive impact."
But Davis, founder of See Jane, a group that focuses on female roles in children's media, says it's "important for boys and girls to see girls taking up half the planet -- half the space of whatever movie they're watching."
The study is the first in a planned series on G-rated movies and TV. Others will include characters' occupations, portrayals of boys and stereotyping and hypersexualizing of female characters.
"What we want to do is work with the industry in a very collegial way to address this," Davis says.
"We think that when the decision-makers see these numbers, they'll be a little surprised."
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