‘Transforming Spaces’ is a series about women driving change in sometimes unexpected places.
Geena Davis and her family were returning from a dinner party in their small Massachusetts town when her great-uncle Jack, 99, began to pull into the oncoming lane. Mrs. Davis was about 8, flanked by her parents in the backseat. Politeness permeated the car, the family, maybe the era, and no one noticed what was happening, not even when another car appeared in the distance and headed toward them at high speed.
Finally, just before the impact, Mrs. Davis’s grandmother made a gentle suggestion from the passenger seat: “Move a little to the right, Jack.” They missed by inches.
Ms. Davis, 67, told this story in her 2022 memoir, “Dying of Politeness,” a summary of the genius-numbing values she absorbed as a child — and which a host of other girls absorb as well: Shift. Come along to interact. Everything is fine.
Of course, the Academy Award-winning actress gave up on that pliability long ago. From “Thelma & Louise” and “A League of Their Own” to this year’s coming-of-age drama, “Fairyland,” back seat docility just wasn’t an option. Self-control was indeed her thing. (Or one of her things. Few profiles haven’t mentioned her Mensa membership, her fluency in Swedish, or her Olympic-caliber archery skills.) But cultivating her own daring was only Stage 1.
Next year marks two decades since the founding of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. When her daughter was a toddler, Mrs. Davis couldn’t help but notice that male characters in children’s television and movies vastly outnumbered female characters.
“I knew that everything is completely out of balance in the world‘ she said recently. But this was the realm of appearances; why wouldn’t it be 50/50?
It wasn’t just the numbers. How the women were represented, their aspirations, the way young girls were sexualized: in children’s programs, Mrs. Davis saw a bewilderingly distorted vision of reality beamed into receptive minds. Long before “diversity, equality, and inclusion” would enter the lexicon, she started calling this gender schism whenever she had an industry meeting.
“Everyone said, ‘No, no, no – it used to be like that, but it’s fixed,” she said. “I started to wonder, what if I had the data to prove I’m right on this one?”
Amid Hollywood’s trumpeting targets, Ms. Davis made it her mission to quietly collect data. Exactly how bad is that schism? In what other ways does it play out? Who else is marginalized outside of gender? Instead of speeches and ribbons, and with sponsors ranging from Google to Hulu, Ms. Davis’ team of researchers began producing receipts.
Ms. Davis was not the first to highlight the differences in popular entertainment. But by using her reputation and resources—and by focusing technology on the problem—she made a vague truth concrete and offered offenders a discreet path to redemption. (While the institute first focused on gender data, its analyzes now extend to race/ethnicity, LGBTQIA+, disability, age over 50 and body type. Random horrible finding: Overweight characters are more than twice as likely to be violent .)
Even bracing for it, the institute’s findings are staggering: In the 101 highest-grossing G-rated films from 1990 to 2005, only 28 percent of speaking characters were female. Even in crowd scenes – even in animated crowd scenes – male characters are much larger than female ones. In the top 56 grossing films of 2018, women portrayed in leadership positions were four times more likely than men to be shown nude. (The bodies of 15 percent of them were filmed in slow motion.) Where a century ago women were completely central to the nascent film industry, they were now a measurable, if sexy, afterthought.
“When she started collecting the data, it was kind of incredible,” said Hillary Hallett, a professor of American studies at Columbia University and the author of “Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood.” “This wasn’t a fuzzy feeling anymore. You couldn’t argue that this was just a feminist diatribe. It was like, ‘Look at these numbers.‘”
Ms. Davis is by turns reserved and goofy off screen – a thoughtful responder, an unbridled guffaw. (At one point she pronounced the word “acting” so theatrically that she feared it would be difficult to spell in this article.) On a recent afternoon in Los Angeles, she took a break from illustrating the children’s book she had written, ‘The Girl Who Was Too Big for the Page.
“I grew up thinking I’m the tallest kid — not just the tallest girl — in my class,” she said. “I had this childhood desire to take up less space in the world.”
Over time, she began to look beyond her height—six feet—to the insidious messages that reinforced that insecurity.
“Hollywood creates our cultural narrative – the prejudice seeps out to the rest of the world,” she said in “This Changes Everything,” the 2018 documentary she produced about gender inequality in the film industry. The documentary takes its name from the incessant chorus she kept hearing after the success of ‘Thelma & Louise’ and later ‘A League of Their Own’. Finally, the power and profitability of female-oriented films was proven – this changes everything! And then, year after year, nothing.
It was here that Ms. Davis planted her stake — a twist on why certain injustices persist and how best to fight them. Where movements like #MeToo and Times Up focus on deliberate monstrosities, hers would be the softer universe of unconscious bias. Did you cast that doctor as a man without thinking? Hiring that white white director because he shares your background? Thought you were diversifying your film just to reinforce old stereotypes? (Fiery Latina, anyone?)
It’s a dogged optimism that drives Ms. Davis’s activism — a belief that Hollywood can voluntarily reshape. Now when she goes to a meeting, she’s armed with her team’s latest research and with the belief that improvement will follow.
“Our theory of change relies on content creators to do well,” said Madeline Di Nonno, the institute’s president and CEO. “As Geena says, we never blame or shame. You have to choose your path, and ours has always been, ‘We’re working with you and want you to do better.’”
If a car full of polite Davises can wake up to impending danger, maybe filmmakers can begin to appreciate the damage they’re perpetuating.
“Not everyone is necessarily trying to screw women or black people,” said Franklin Leonard, a film and television producer and founder of the Black List, a popular platform for unproduced screenplays. “But the choices they make certainly have that consequence, regardless of what they believe about their intent.”
He added: “It’s not something people are necessarily aware of. And there is no paper trail – it can only be revealed in total. That touches on the value of Geena’s work.”
Unique to the institute’s efforts is its partnership with the University of Southern California’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory, which uses software and machine learning to analyze scripts and other media. A tool that grew out of that collaboration, Spellcheck for Bias, uses AI to scan scripts for stereotypes and other problematic choices. (Janine Jones-Clark, the executive vice president of inclusion for NBCUniversal’s global talent development and inclusion team, recalled a scene on a television show in which a person of color appeared to be behaving in a threatening manner toward another character. A times marked by the software, the scene was reshot.)
Still, progress has been mixed. In 2019 and 2020, the institute reported that gender parity for lead female characters had been achieved in Nielsen’s top 100 highest-grossing family films and top-rated children’s television shows. Nearly 70 percent of industry executives familiar with the institute’s research have made changes to at least two projects.
But women represented just 18 percent of directors working on the top 250 films of 2022, only 1 percent more than in 2021, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film; the percentage of major Asian and Asian American female characters fell from 10 percent in 2021 to less than 7 percent in 2022. A 2021 McKinsey report showed that 92 percent of film executives were white—less diverse than Donald Trump’s then-current administration , like Mr. Leonard of the Black List noticed.
“I think the industry is more resistant to change than anyone realizes,” he added. “So I’m incredibly grateful to anyone — and especially someone from Geena’s background — who is doing the unglamorous things to try and change it, in the trenches with Excel spreadsheets.”
Ms. Davis has not quit her day job. (Coming soon: A role in “Pussy Island,” a thriller from Zoe Kravitz in her directorial debut.) But acting shares a bill with her books, the diversity-focused Bentonville Film Festival she started in Arkansas in 2015 — even the rollercoasters she rides. for equity. (Yes, Thelma is now Disney’s gender consultant for its theme parks and resorts.)
“We are definitely moving in the right direction,” she said. “Bill Gates called himself an impatient optimist, and that feels pretty good for what I am.”
