May 2006
Where the Girls Aren’t
Geena Davis, TV’s first female president, tackles a new cultural challenge for the sake of daughters everywhere.
By Cindy Chang
Lanky and fair, with a huge smile evoking gingham and stories shared over the backyard fence, Geena Davis’ patent appeal is her everywoman geniality. She’s someone you feel you can relate to, the woman next door who could, in an alternate universe, have been a friend of yours — if it weren’t for her Hollywood life of starring roles, Oscar parties and adoring fans.
Yet what distinguishes Davis from the crowd of other likeable performers is the unusual strength of conviction that seems to lie just beneath that expansive grin, the feeling that under duress, like Thelma from the classic Thelma and Louise, Davis would have the courage to stand up and say, “Stop it — no more!”
With the US yet to elect its first female president, the image of the six-foot tall Davis onscreen delivering the State of the Union address or resolving a diplomatic crisis on ABC’s primetime drama Commander-in-Chief is striking — transgressive, even. But, as Davis is well aware from her 25-year career in film and television, weighty female roles like Thelma Dickinson and Pres. Mackenzie Allen are still more the exception than the rule.
After she became a mother — which, these days, means long hours viewing the same children’s’ DVDs over and over — Davis began to consider a related issue. How many female characters were there for her three-year-old daughter Alizeh to emulate in the countless hours of G-rated programming she consumed? Davis did her own unscientific study, counting the male characters on one hand and the females on the other. She soon ran out of fingers on the male hand. It was not just the leading roles; even the dancing chipmunks and singing fish — the Greek choruses of animated films — were mostly boys.
Davis took full advantage of the fact that she was not just an ordinary mom. She used her Hollywood muscle to establish the nonprofit See Jane, whose mission is to “dramatically increase” the number of female characters in movies, television shows and other media aimed at young children.
The See Jane advisory board includes some children’s programming heavyweights: Nickelodeon executive Brown Johnson; Linda Simensky, senior director of children’s programming at PBS Kids; and Gerry Laybourne, Oxygen Media founder and former president of Nickelodeon. The effort has been endorsed by Jamie Lee Curtis, Dustin Hoffman, Arianna Huffington, Norman Lear, Rob Reiner and Geena’s former partner in crime, Susan Sarandon.
Earlier this year, See Jane released a study billed as the first ever to take a detailed look at gender representation in G-rated films. The study, conducted by researchers at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, bore out Davis’ homespun count. In the animated and live-action children’s films the researchers examined, there were about three male characters for every one female character.
“We know that kids learn their value by seeing themselves reflected in the culture. They see themselves and they say, ‘I must matter. I must count. There I am,’” Davis said. “What message are we sending to kids if there are so few female characters and the females are devalued as sidelines?”
The See Jane study analyzed the 101 top-grossing G-rated films from 1990 to 2004, finding that fewer than one-in-three speaking characters was female and only about one-in-five of the characters in crowd scenes was female. An overwhelming majority of narrators — four out of five — were male. Overall, the female characters occupied only 25 percent of the roles. These gender disparities held steady over the 14-year time frame of the study — and all film companies seemed to be equally responsible for creating far more male than female characters.
“Although many people would argue things seem to be getting better, our data suggests that that is not the case,” said lead researcher Stacy Smith, a professor at the Annenberg School.
Veteran producer Lucy Fisher, whose credits include Memoirs of a Geisha, Peter Pan and Stuart Little (there’s that two-to-one ratio again), said she was shocked by the study results.
Based on her own frustrating attempts to cut down on cigarette smoking in films, she is not convinced that the film industry will come around quickly on the gender issue. “I’m really stunned,” said Fisher, who is on the See Jane endorser list. “I’m not as optimistic as Geena that anything changes fast.”
Davis’ next step will be to challenge the industry movers-and-shakers who can actually influence whether an animated kangaroo is a boy or a girl. Later this year, See Jane will release other studies on the portrayal of boys, occupational expectations for girls and boys, and body image in children’s media.
“I think [the gender inequity] is not in our genes and in our natures; I think we get it from the culture,” Davis said. “I’m hoping that when the kids who see the movies that [will be coming out] in a few years with gender equity, when they grow up, there’ll be more girls in the movies.”
Davis pointed to the black See Jane T-shirt she wore under her tweed pantsuit, which proclaimed, “Women. We’ll settle for half.” See Jane’s goal, she explained, is not to institute an equal number of males and females in every single film — a kind of affirmative action for cartoon characters — but something approaching overall parity among children’s media.
“What I want out of all of this,” Davis explains, “is for kids to see worlds where it’s normal and natural that half of whatever this world has created — if it’s Martians or dinosaurs or talking toaster ovens — that half of them, roughly, are females, just like the real world, where girls take up half the space.”
Cindy Chang is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.
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