In the movies, women are talking (as Mark Wahlberg put it) — but not as much as the men.
Male-speaking characters outnumbered their female counterparts 63 percent to 37 percent in the 100 highest-grossing domestic films of 2022, according to the latest “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World” report from San Diego State’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film.
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This year’s report added demographic analysis of more than 2,100 characters to a body of research that now spans two decades, 1,200 movies and more than 27,000 characters. In 2022, women served as the protagonist in roughly a third of movies (33 percent), roughly consistent with the trend from the last five years and up from 16 percent in 2002, the first year of the study. Interestingly, horror movies were much more likely to have female leads (43 percent of female protagonists appeared in scary films) than male (just 4 percent of male leads did).
Women comprised 38 percent of major characters — defined as appearing in more than one scene and “instrumental to the action of the story” — in 2022, with little significant deviation year over year. There were no major nonbinary or transgender-speaking characters. Among the top 100 movies of 2022, 0.1 percent of speaking characters were transgender and only one character was explicitly nonbinary.
In general, the movies tended to put younger women onscreen. The most-featured decade for both men and women was the 30s, while the second-most for men was the 40s (29 percent of male characters) compared to the 20s for female characters (20 percent). There were actually fewer 40-something female characters in 2022’s crop of films (14 percent) than in 2015 (20 percent). “Age is not just an employment issue for actors,” said Martha Lauzen, founder and executive director for the Center. “When female characters are relatively young, they are less likely to hold positions of great personal or professional…
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