Investing in Women: Why Hollywood Won't Do It

We are starting to see a rise in popularity of material with strong female protagonists, played by kick-ass actresses who do their roles justice (Jodie Foster in pretty much everything recent, Kyra Sedgwick in “The Closer” and Glen Close and Rose Byrne in “Damages” jump to mind). And although the success of these shows demonstrates the potential for audiences to accept out-of-the-box female characters on a pretty large scale, we’re not talking about a revolution of actresses. 

Women are so deficiently represented behind the camera (only 7 percent of the directors belonging to the DGA are women), and even with what gains we can ITALS identify, there’s still plenty of sexist stereotyping going on. 

Tina Fey earned plenty of esteem for holding her position as head writer of “SNL,” and her work on “30 Rock” deserves all the hype it gets, but in 2009, is it really so amazing to the world that a woman can run a show and be funny on par with men? The revolution is in relaxing the emphasis on what’s familiar to create an atmosphere where women in the business feel emboldened by more objective, strong, complex and truthful images of themselves for which they can fight -- and from which audiences can draw inspiration.

Singling Hollywood out for its dogged conformity to gender stereotypes is particularly important because it's not just about what women like me encounter in the workplace. My roadblocks are my own to blast through, but it’s a scary fact that all of the subtle cues that we ingest from the media are unintentionally digested, and they affect our mindsets. 

Any pop psychologist will tell you that, on some level, we are incapable of entirely understanding (let alone controlling) many of the human motivations and social impulses that drive us. And the upsetting view from behind the scenes shows that stereotypes in media are not perpetuated innocently. People cling to demographics, which figure prominently into the market research that are used to evaluate the potential risk and reward of a given script. 

Stereotypes are bandied about during meetings as solid reasons why something could never work, and material is faithfully compared to them to make sure that its characters match up. 

For women, everything is made even more complicated by the obsession with celebrity and the cult of beauty that is arguably the backbone of the industry. It’s harder than in other industries to combat the ideology that fuels our unconscious perceptions for the worse when actresses are forced to uphold impractical standards of beauty just to stay working -- because marketing a movie often relies heavily on exploiting the attractiveness and sexuality of the female lead. 

And when mainstream movies are reaching massive audiences, the stereotypes they choose to embrace, for convenience or familiarity or to sell tickets, are permeating culture on the same scale.

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