Shock Study Says Women Woefully Under-Represented in Films

Lost in the Oscar night hubbub was a line by Cate Blanchett after she won the Best Actress award for Blue Jasmine.

Female-driven films like Gravity and Blue Jasmine, Blanchett said, aren’t niche movies. Audiences like them, and they make money.

That message clearly hasn’t gotten through to Hollywood power brokers.

A new report which examined roughly 7,000 screen characters since 2002 says female characters are woefully under-represented in movies. The numbers, frankly, are startling.

Female characters accounted for only 15% of protagonists in the 100 highest-grossing domestic films of 2013, according to the study “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World” by veteran researcher Martha Lauzen, exec director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State U.

The femme protagonist stats are up 4% from 2011, the last time the survey was conducted, but down 1% from 2002.