The year 2023 was dubbed as “The year women saved Hollywood,” given the success of “Barbie” in the box office and SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher guiding the guild through a 118-day strike.
But new data from the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s 2023 annual report shows that women still lag in representation on and off the screen. The report’s authors also noted limited progress when it comes to underrepresented racial or ethnic groups on and off the screen.
The study shows that the amount of movies with girls and women as leads and co-leads was substantially lower in 2023 (30%) than 2022 (44%). This represents a 14-percentage point drop within one year. The report highlighted that the percentage of female speaking characters in 2023 (31.7%) “has not meaningfully changed” since 2007 (29.9%).
“No matter how you examine the data, 2023 was not the ‘Year of the Woman.’ We continue to report the same trends for girls and women on screen, year in and year out,” said Annenberg Inclusion Initiative founder Stacy L. Smith in a statement on The Hollywood Reporter.
“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 said.
For the analysis, the report’s authors evaluated 1,700 top-grossing movies from 2007 to 2023 and focused on the top 100 films for portrayals of gender, race and ethnicity, LGBTQ+, and disability. The study, which was released Aug. 5, also looks at gender and the race and ethnicity of directors, writers, producers, composers and casting directors working behind the camera. This is the 17th edition of the report.
With 116 individuals credited as directors on the top 100 movies in 2023, 12.1% were women and 87.9% were men. The percentage of women directors was not particularly different from 2022 , but it was almost 10 percentage points higher than 2007..
The analysis reported 98 women directing movies between 2007 and 2023. That’s compared to 878 individual male directors in that same period. Of the women directors, only 25 were of color.
Critics have lambasted Oppenheimer — which dominated the awards season and took Best Picture at this year’s Oscar’s —for failing the Bechdel test, a metric to gauge women’s representation in film.
“While Oppenheimer does have two main female characters — Kitty, Oppenheimer’s wife (played by Blunt) and Jean Tatlock, Oppenheimer’s mistress (played by Pugh) — at no point do these women ever speak to each other about something other than a man,” Alexandra Koster wrote in Refinery 29.
Writer Rebecca Solnit chimed in, noting on X that the film “nuked the Bechdel test.” Disappearing from the movie, Solnit wrote, was physicist Lise Meitner, “she who first comprehended that atoms could be and had been split.”
The film, wrote Solnit, “largely erased women physicists at Los Alamos and elsewhere, women in general beyond the hero’s wife and lover, New Mexicans as inhabitants of Los Alamos, workers there, and Trinity downwinders, and Hiroshima/Nagasaki victims. That’s a lot.”
Annenberg also reported limited progress for protagonists of color.
It found that 37 films in 2023 featured a lead or co-lead from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group driving the plot. This is up from 31 in 2022 and 13 in 2007, but it’s only slightly better than the 35 in 2021.
Across all speaking characters, however, the report found the percentage of white characters (55.7%) has decreased significantly from 2022 (61.7%) and 2007 (77.6%).
Storytellers behind the scenes are also primarily white, according to the report.
Of the 116 directors in 2023, 78.4% were white and 21.6% were from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group. This has remained “virtually identical” to 2022 (21.2%). Both years, however, were higher than 2007 (12.5%).
While the report shows progress moving slowly, Annenberg has previously noted a shift in Academy Awards nominations following April Reign’s launch of the “OscarsSoWhite movement.
“She tapped into the collective desire for change and the outrage that people felt at seeing actors of color excluded once again from this career-defining award,” Smith said in a 2023 statement. “This comprehensive look at the Oscars demonstrates that exclusion was normative for many years and still is in many categories. But it also shows that there is power in collective action, and that energy has ensured that the years since #OscarsSoWhite do not look like the years that came before.”
Regarding LGBTQ+ representation on screen, the report found a total of 60 speaking or named characters in 2023. Of these, 20 were lesbians, 31 were gay, eight were bisexual, and one was of another sexuality.
There was not one transgender character who spoke or was named on screen in 2023, according to the report.
The prevalence of lesbian, gay and bisexual characters in 2023 was lower than in 2022 which featured 87 characters, Annenberg found.
