Study Reveals Decline in Representation

“Barbie” may have been a box office hit in the previous year, but 2023 showed a disappointing step back for female representation in film. According to a new report from USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, led by founder Stacy L. Smith, the number of top-grossing movies featuring female leads dropped significantly in 2023 compared to 2022. The report also highlighted that the overall ratio of men to women with speaking roles has remained largely unchanged since 2007, despite ongoing discussions and efforts to improve Hollywood’s diversity.

This review, covering the top 100 films from 2007 to 2023, examined 1,700 features—including both live-action and animated films—to evaluate gender, race/ethnicity, LGBTQ+ identity, and disability status on screen. It also looked at the demographics of directors, writers, producers, composers, and casting directors.

One of the key takeaways from this 17th edition of the report is that movies starring girls or women as lead or co-lead characters dropped to 30% in 2023, a significant decrease from 44% in 2022. Despite the drop, there’s been some progress since 2007 when only 20% of top-grossing films had female leads.

“No matter how you examine the data, 2023 was not the ‘Year of the Woman,’” Smith said in a statement. “We continue to report the same trends for girls and women on screen, year in and year out. 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,” Smith added.

Another finding was that only 11% of the top 100 movies of 2023 featured a roughly equal number of male and female characters. In 2023, a mere five of the top 100 movies had more women than men. Out of 5,084 speaking characters analyzed, just 31.7% were women, and less than 1% were nonbinary. Men comprised the remaining 68.2% of speaking roles. This is a slight decrease from 2022 when 34.6% of speaking characters were women. There has been no significant improvement since 2007 when 29.9% of speaking characters were women.

Meanwhile, only 1.2% of speaking characters in 2023 were from the LGBTQ+ community, with no transgender characters being represented, indicating no meaningful progress since 2014.

The report also highlighted concerns about racial and ethnic representation on screen. Although there was an increase in the number of films with protagonists from underrepresented races or ethnicities—from 31 in 2022 to 37 in 2023—the overall progress remains marginal. Specifically, the proportion of Asian speaking characters rose to 18% in 2023 compared to just 3% in 2007. This increase corresponds to a decline in white characters to 56% in 2023 from 78% in 2007, with no considerable shifts for other racial or ethnic groups over this period.

In addition, only 14% of the top films in 2023 featured a female character from an underrepresented race or ethnicity, down from 18% in 2022. The report also noted a glaring absence of representation for certain racial or ethnic groups. In 2023, 99 of the top 100 films lacked American Indian/Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander girls and women. Furthermore, 81 didn’t include Middle Eastern/North African women, 62 lacked Hispanic/Latinas, 49 didn’t depict Asians, and 39 films were missing Black/African American women.

“The epidemic of invisibility has been left unchecked for years,” Smith said. “The result is that girls and women from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups continue to see their stories and their reflections erased in the most popular content each year.”

On a positive note, the report highlighted a significant growth in the representation of characters from underrepresented backgrounds in animated films. In 2023, 67.9% of all animated speaking characters were from underrepresented races or ethnicities, up from 59.2% in 2022 and just 8.1% in 2007.

Last year’s report pointed out that, despite years of advocacy, Hollywood had failed to make substantial advances in inclusion within its most popular films. This year’s report likewise criticized industry decision-makers for ignoring solutions proposed for years to enhance diversity.

“The recipe for creating inclusion does not change from year to year,” Smith stated. “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.”

The full report can be found on the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative website.

Source: Los Angeles Times, USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative