Conscious Choice Seattle: Where the Girls Aren’t

May 2006 | Feature Story

Where the Girls Aren’t

Geena Davis, TV’s first female president, takes on the media for the sake of daughters everywhere

By Cindy Chang

Lanky and blonde, 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 like, the woman next door who could, in an alternate universe, could be a friend of yours—if it weren’t for her Hollywood life of nine-figure contracts, Oscar parties and adoring fans.

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. You get the feeling that under duress, just like Thelma role from the classic “Thelma and Louise,” Davis would have the courage to stand up and say, “Stop it—no more!”

With the U.S. yet to elect its first female president, the image of the 6-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, in this day and age often means long hours viewing the same children’s’ DVDs again and again and again—Davis began to consider a related issue. How many female characters were there for her 3-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 too.

Davis took full advantage of the fact that she was not just an ordinary mom. She used her Hollywood muscle to establish the nonprofit organization See Jane. Its 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 Davis’ former partner in cinematic crime, Susan Sarandon.

Researching the message

Earlier this year, See Jane—which operates as a program of the nonprofit foundation Dads and Daughters—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 University of Southern California 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,” says Davis at an event publicizing the study findings. “They see themselves and they say, ‘I must matter. I must count. There I am.’ 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 out of 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. With all the different types of roles taken together, the number of female characters averaged out to one in four, or 25 percent. The gender disparities held steady over the 14-year time frame of the study—and all film companies seemed to be equally responsible for writing 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. Things have not changed since 1990,” says 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.” Says 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 the film industry will come around quickly on the gender issue.

“I’m really stunned,” says Fisher, who is on the See Jane endorser list. “I’m not as optimistic as Geena that anything changes fast.”

“We’ll settle for half”

Davis’ next step will be circulating the study to 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 says. “This will all be too late to help my movie career. But 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 that 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 as a whole.
“What I want out of all of this 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,” says Davis. “It’s just like the real world, where girls take up half the space.”

Cindy Chang is a freelance writer who contributes regularly to the Los Angeles Times and New York Times.

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