Alexandra Juhasz, Pitzer College
The Geena Davis Institute’s most recent study looked at popular films across 11 countries, to understand gender bias in movies. It’s not entirely a surprise that women are largely underrepresented in popular film across the globe, but the numbers prove the severity of the issue. Only 10% of all films investigated had gender balanced casts according to the study. The research also highlighted that women in executive and leadership roles were a rarity. The numbers are as low as 4% for female sports figures and 15% for women in medicine and health on-screen. One of the solutions is to ensure the presence and cultivation of more female filmmakers. The study says that the more female filmmakers there are, the more female characters we will see on-screen; an approximate 6.8% increase occurs in the number of women on-screen when a woman directs.
Alexandra Juhasz, Pitzer College
Read More: Gender Bias Without Borders
Those women who have the opportunity to work behind the camera have both the opportunity and the burden to portray women in the media. Professor Alexandra Juhasz is an independent film producer and media studies lecturer at Pitzer College. She says that the changes in women’s professions and power in society is not reflected in feature films. However, that doesn’t mean that female filmmakers should carry the responsibility to portray women in ways that resolve such issues.
She explains that, “No one has a responsibility to do anything. They come to that responsibility through their own choices.” She talks to the notion or the idea of a burden that is placed on women, on people of color and on gays and lesbians. “This idea that because you are making film as a woman, as a gay person, as a person of color, it is your responsibility to speak for the race or for women”, she explains. Juhasz does take on the responsibility of political projects with her movies, she is the producer of one the first African-American lesbian films, but she is clear that it is unfair to have this expectation of all or any women filmmakers.
Hillery McDonald is the producer of a candid documentary that aims to educate men on the functioning of the female brain, with the sole purpose of “getting laid” or having sex with a woman. She understands that some might take offense to how women are portrayed in her movie, but she stands by the fact that the information is factual. She admits that, “Many times I questioned the bigger message that I was giving out … but ultimately we always ended up answering, but it’s true. Can something be wrong to say, if it’s actually true?” McDonald says, “I didn’t want to be a moralistic voice. I was trying to hold up a mirror to what is”.
The co-president of the Women of Cinematic Arts (for the undergraduate division at USC), Allison Begalman, feels strongly about women’s roles in portraying women in the media. Begalman was part of the team who worked on the study by the Geena Davis Institute. She feels that women are often inaccurately portrayed by male writers (and sometimes even female writers). The group, Women of Cinematic Arts, aims to create a female networking community that debates these very issues on gender and media and allow for women in film to create opportunities for other women. She acknowledges that movies need to be commercially successful and she wants that type of success too, but at the same time she sees herself as an activist “I really care about the way I am shown on screen, I care about the way minorities are shown on screen”. She hopes that other filmmakers will also take a less traditional route to their stories and characters. Feature films may not reflect reality for some time to come, but independent cinema and the Internet offer female filmmakers the chance to tell any story they want to. The stories they choose to tell are a matter of personal preference and may not always facilitate a movement to resolve issues around women in the media.
Read More: Women Directors to Watch in 2014