On-Screen Sex Ratios Add Up to One Big Negative

By Lynn Ziegler, Women's eNews. Posted April 9, 2008.

Women on "The View" may get Barack Obama showing up to pay his presidential-hopeful respects. Oprah's one-woman media empire may seem like a world without end. And Ellen DeGeneres' daily dance-and-gabfest recently has taken a more activist spin (just ask Chris Matthews!)

But that doesn't mean mainstream entertainment -- meaning TV and film -- reflects anything like our true worth to girls and women.

Earlier this year, researchers gathered from all over the country -- and the world -- at the University of Southern California to present studies that document and display the historical context of how we see females on TV (if they are on-screen at all). The conference was a first for the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.

An overview of female portrayals on U.S. TV there reminded conference-goers that the United States television in the late 1950s and early 1960s -- had such extremes as "Rifleman" and "Bonanza" with no major female characters at all -- and shows like "Bewitched" and "I Dream of Jeannie," in which female leads had to minimize their talents when they orchestrated "real life" with their men.

Today we have more programs with stronger female characters: "Cold Case," "Grey's Anatomy," "Desperate Housewives," "Law and Order." But the fact that women make up more than half the world's population is not reflected on-screen. The male-female on-screen ratio is still only 1-in-3, up from a more dismal 1-in-5 two decades ago.

In a study presented at the conference of 13 top-grossing children's films with female leads -- produced between the mid-1930s through the 1990s and many of them from Disney--only one featured a character who wasn't looking for "happily ever after" with a prince. Dorothy Gale, from "The Wizard of Oz"--the oldest movie in the bunch as it so happens -- kept her eyes on a different prize: going home.

Animation Offers Big Challenge

Animation--where hypersexualization is intense -- offers some of the biggest challenges to gender parity. Animated females are thin and impossibly stylized. Many conference-goers talked about how there is literally "no room for a womb" in these busty, hourglass-shaped females.

In sharing her recent work with the conference, Stacy Smith from the Annenberg School of Communications, told attendees a story of two female researchers who went to a studio to meet with a very successful illustrator. He showed them a crowd scene that he was finishing. "Here are some businessmen. Over here is a cop directing traffic. There are some guys doing construction work on a building, and some kids on the corner, skateboarding . . . this is a group of doctors leaving a medical center."

Everyone was male.

"And here," he said proudly, "is the girl." For the record, she was wearing SRC (sexually revealing clothing), had a waist that was too tiny to allow blood to reach her brain and, no surprise, inordinately large breasts.

The two researchers -- keeping their eyes on the prize -- said, "Well . . . what if you added some women to the group of business people? And a female doctor talking to an EMT in front of the hospital? And over here, a female city engineer talking to the architect? And . . ."

The illustrator put his hands to his face. "Oh my God. The problem here is ME."

Like many other men in a male-dominated entertainment industry, he had gotten the idea that having one "girl" -- drawn as the "ideal" woman -- was representation. It's not.

It's about the numbers. And the shapes. And colors. And sizes. And ages. And our part in the big picture.

'We Thought It Was Better'

"We thought it was better," was the general sentiment expressed by conference-goers, even by longtime media activists used to the glacial pace of progress.

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Lynn Ziegler is the author of "Spongeheadz: U and Media" (2007). She has three media-savvy Alaska Native kids who support her work for on-screen diversity and who cheerfully ignore her screeching when she watches TV.

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