From Austin Powers to Deadpool: Where Are the Women?

Following movements like #TimesUp and #MeToo, the institutional sexism in Hollywood has come to the world’s attention. Gender inequality exists both behind the scenes, as well as on the screen with imbalances between male and female characters in films. 

Conor Neville ’18, ’19 (M.S.), who studies experimental psychology in SJU’s five-year dual undergraduate and graduate program, has spent the past year and a half collecting the raw data on gender representation in U.S. films. The resulting paper, "Fewer, Younger, but Increasingly Powerful: How Portrayals of Women, Age, and Power Have Changed from 2002 to 2016 in the 50 Top-Grossing U.S. Films," has been accepted for publication in the academic, peer-reviewed journal Sex Roles by Springer Publishing. Co-authored with Phyllis Anastasio, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology, the project has also been featured in The Guardian.

Neville’s research was inspired by an article he read, "Maintaining the Double Standard: Portrayals of Age and Gender in Popular Films" (Lauzen & Dozier, 2005), that showed statistics  concerning double standards and negative portrayals of women. His own research built upon this data and demanded whether films had changed since 2002 regarding gender, age and portrayal.

For this paper, Neville and his team watched the top 50 grossing movies of 2016 and coded characters as major or minor and male or female. For major characters, he coded several personality characteristics, including leadership, achieving goals, occupational power and social and physical aggression, using an operational definition of the attribute with a set of defining actions. For example, “social aggression” was measured by the numbers of instances in which a character displayed behaviors such as eye-rolling or negative body language.

The results? Mixed — but improving. Men still comprise two-thirds of all characters in film, but the percentage of women in films has statistically improved: In 2002, 72 percent of characters were male; while in 2016, 67 percent were male, overall improving the balance of gender representation.

“We found no difference in leadership and social aggression between men and women,” states Neville. “In this instance, no difference is a good thing.”  

Although Neville had perceived from previous literature that Hollywood would show social aggression as a stereotypically female trait, the data shows no disparity in this trait between the sexes. Men have higher rates of physical aggression, which Neville attributes to popular superhero movies in recent years, but women are shown to achieve their goals at significantly higher rates.

Neville additionally sorted films by genre and ran a statistical analysis of each. Unsurprisingly, in the action and adventure genres, characters had higher rates of physical aggression, but he found no difference between men and women in physical or social aggression in terms of genre. In dramas, he found a disparity between male and female characters — women were portrayed as subordinate to men in occupational power, but conversely achieved their goals far more often. 

"Those in power have a responsibility to speak out for those who are not,” says Neville. “Both men and women must speak up to remove the barriers to equal opportunity, allowing for skill and talent to shine through on center-stage."