{"id":41677,"date":"2023-10-20T15:15:42","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:15:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/if-she-can-see-it-she-can-be-it-does-hollywood-hold-the-answer-to-more-women-in-stem-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:15:42","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:15:42","slug":"if-she-can-see-it-she-can-be-it-does-hollywood-hold-the-answer-to-more-women-in-stem-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/if-she-can-see-it-she-can-be-it-does-hollywood-hold-the-answer-to-more-women-in-stem-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"“If she can see it, she can be it”: Does Hollywood hold the answer to more women in STEM? – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
Perennial stories about the lack of women working in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) often revolve around why women are not studying these subjects, and when they do, why they don\u2019t make their careers in these areas.<\/p>\n
The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in the Media asks a different question. Are women not working in science because there are very few women portrayed in films and on TV who are working in science?<\/p>\n
Academy Award-winning actress, Geena Davis, founded the institute that bears her name to educate, advocate and influence the media and entertainment industry to encourage more diverse representations of women and girls.<\/p>\n
Over the past eight years it has provided quantitative research that exposes the unconscious gender biases in casting, screen writing and story-telling.<\/p>\n
The institute has teamed up with Google to use their machine learning technology \u2013 along with the University of Southern California\u2019s audio-visual processing technologies, called GD-IQ \u2013 to analyse the content of films. GD-IQ automates the analysis of media content with greater precision than the human eye and can process vast amounts of data quickly.<\/p>\n
At the Equity Foundation\u2019s Gender on the Agenda Summit held in Melbourne this week, the institute\u2019s CEO, Madeline Di Nonno outlined some recent research findings. The institute reviewed the top grossing, non-animated films of 2014 and 2015 as reported by Variety, the US published film and TV magazine.<\/p>\n
Only 17% had female leads. Male characters dominated the screen \u2013 as the main figure in the camera shot \u2013 almost twice as much as women (28.5% to 16%).<\/p>\n
When a film had a male lead, men dominated the screen thrice as much as women (34.5% to 12.9%). In films where the lead character was a woman, men still had slightly more screen time than women (about 24% to 22%).<\/p>\n
When looking at speaking time for both genders, results were similar \u2013 but in male led films the gap was even greater. In films with a male lead, men spoke 33.1% of the time while women spoke less than 10%.<\/p>\n
Further research across the same time period shows a stark lack of women characters in STEM jobs.<\/p>\n
Looking at family films, characters in STEM careers were 83.8% male. Breaking down the figures, women were shown in life and physical sciences more often than men (65.4% to 49.3%) but in computer science, maths and in engineering just 7.7% of those characters were women.<\/p>\n
In prime-time TV programs, no women were shown in engineering, at all.<\/p>\n