Inequality unchanged in Hollywood, study suggests

Despite widespread attention over diversity in the movie business, a new study finds that little is changing in Hollywood for women and minorities people and others who continue to find themselves on the outside of an industry where researchers say inequality is “the norm.”

A report to be released Wednesday by the Media, Diversity and Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism offers a stark portrait of Hollywood’s feeble to nonexistent progress in eradicating what researchers call “pervasive and systematic” problems in inclusiveness in front of and behind the camera.
Since 2007, USC has analyzed the demographic makeup of the actors, directors, writers and more from each year’s 100 most popular films. Its latest addition adds data from 2015’s top films, but finds little change.
For example, 31.4 percent of speaking characters in the analyzed films were female in 2015 — roughly the same number as in 2007. That’s a ratio of 2.2 men for every single woman.
From 2007 to 2015, the study finds no significant change in the percentage of black (12.2 percent), Latino (5.3 percent) or Asian (3.9 percent) characters in the most popular films.
Off screen, of the 107 directors of 2015 films, four were black or African American and six were Asian or Asian American. Just eight were women, still the most since 2008.
“We’re seeing entrenched inequality,” Stacy L. Smith, a USC professor and the study’s lead author, said in an interview. 
“We’re really seeing exclusionary forces leaving out anybody that’s not a straight, white, able-bodied man. Despite all the chatter and all the activism and all the press attention, it’s another year where the status quo has been maintained.”
USC researchers stressed that the study’s results didn’t just offer a portrait of inequality, but captured the invisibility of many from American popular cinema. Hollywood, the study concludes, is “an epicenter of cultural inequality.”

Source: Arab News