Only a Third of 2022 Movies Had a Female Protagonist According to Report

San Diego State’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film has released its latest “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World” report just in time for International Women’s Day. The analysis, according to The Hollywood Reporter, from this year added “more than 2,100 characters to a body of research that now spans two decades, 1,200 movies and more than 27,000 characters” to its analysis.

In 2022, women-talking characters were outnumbered by male characters at 37% to 63%. About a third of movies featured women as protagonists, such as Everything Everywhere All At Once, Tár, and Encanto. Regarding major characters, who needed to appear more than once and be “instrumental to the story’s action,” women made up 38%. There was only 0.1% of speaking characters were transgender and only one character was “explicitly” nonbinary.

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The findings of the protagonist analysis were “roughly consistent” with the trend found in film from the last five years, though the numbers have gone up from the first years of the study in 2002. That year it was 16%, thanks to movies like Panic Room, Maid in Manhattan, and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.

The study found horror movies were more likely to have female leads than male leads at 43% to 4%. Some horror movies with male leads over the past year were Nope, The Pale Blue Eye, and Beast. That statistic is probably not a surprise to those familiar with the genre. After all, Carol J. Clover didn’t coin the term “final boy” in 1992 with the book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.

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The Age and Race Of Women Characters

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Amongst both men and women, the most commonly aged person was in their 30s, though they differ in the second-most featured decade. For men, 29% of characters were in their 40s, while for women, 20% of characters were in their 20s. There were only 14% of women aged 40 in movies. For the sake of comparison, there were 20% of 40-year-old women in 2015.

“Age is not just an employment issue for actors. When female characters are relatively young, they are less likely to hold positions of great personal or professional power. Viola Davis and Cate Blanchett are superb actors, but they are also convincing, at least in part, because they have achieved the gravitas and life experience needed to play those roles,” said Martha Lauzen, founder and executive director for the center.

Approximately 64.2% of female roles in 2022 were white, with the speaking roles for women of color decreasing. There were “18 percent Black, 6.9 percent Latina, 8.1 percent Asian, 0.8 percent Middle Eastern and North African, 0.4 percent multiracial and zero Native American.” Only black and MENA women didn’t experience a decrease in major characters, with the remaining ones being “7 percent were Latina, 6.6 percent Asian, 0.7 percent multiracial and again no Native Americans.”

“From 2020 to 2021, the increases in the numbers of major Latina and female Asian American characters were due to films featuring higher concentrations of characters in these groups, such as In the Heights, West Side Story and Raya and the Last Dragon,” Lauzen explained in a statement. “However, the absence of similar films in 2022 caused the percentages of females in these groups to drop.”

You can view the original article HERE.