More than half of the 100 most popular films in 2024 featured women in lead and co-lead roles, huge progress from the 20 movies that qualified in 2007, the first year of the USC initiative’s study, a new Annenberg study found.
The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative released its annual diversity study on the top 100 films of the year, and it found that in 2024, onscreen and behind-the-camera inclusion across gender, race/ethnicity, the LGBTQ+ community and people with disabilities remained more or less the same.
The study’s full findings revealed little progress in overall speaking roles for female characters onscreen. Of the 4,401 speaking characters considered, only 33.6% of them were girls or women; compare that to 29.9% in 2007 and 31.7% as recently as 2023.
“While it’s encouraging to see that the film business can achieve gender parity on screen, reaching this benchmark for lead/co-lead characters is only the beginning,” Dr. Stacy L. Smith, founder of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, said of the Tuesday study, titled, “Inequality in 1,800 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBTQ+ & Characters with Disabilities from 2007 to 2024.”
“Changing the ecosystem of content requires thinking about all the aspects of a story, not only who is at the center,” Smith added.
The study also examined female representation in roles behind the camera, which at 21.7% directors, 12.9% screenwriters, 27% producers and 8.4% composers saw large strides since 2007 (where composing, for instance, saw zero female composers in top 100 films), but plateaued between 2023 and 2024.
As far as where the study found regression in diversity gains seen in years past, Asian characters dropped from 18.4% of all speaking roles in 2023 to 13.5% in 2024, while the percentage of white characters increased in that same period. LGBTQ+ characters, meanwhile, reached just 39 speaking roles (less than 1% total, significantly below proportional representation with the U.S. population of 10%) in the top 100 films, compared to 60 in 2023 — which itself was a drop-off from 88 speaking roles in 2022. Eighty-two films in 2024 featured zero LGBTQ+ characters.
Like female characters in 2024, however, characters with a disability saw an uptick in representation last year. Twenty percent of the top-grossing films had a lead or co-lead with a disability, a new study high that exceeds the 2023’s eight films. The same cannot be said, though, for non-lead speaking roles with a disability, which came to just 2.4% of all speaking roles, the same number as in 2015.
“The major areas of progress this year, for women and for characters with disabilities, occurred only for leading characters,” Smith said. “This suggests that the change is not driven by an authentic desire for inclusion and matched with strategies based in expertise. Instead, ad hoc decision-making is the reason for these increases.
“Until evidence- and theory-based strategies are implemented, progress will continue to be sporadic and uneven.”
For more on this year’s “Inequality in 1,800 Popular Films” study, visit annenberg.usc.edu and follow along on social media @Inclusionists.
