Hollywood still sucks for people who aren't white, male, and straight

Hollywood is still #sowhite, #somale, #sostraight, #sonotinclusive.

With this year’s Oscars featuring a record number of black actors and major companies like HBO focusing on developing shows by people of color, you might think the entertainment industry is making some real progress on cultivating diversity, but a new study from USC suggests that for now, building inclusion is still more Hollywood fantasy than reality.

Researchers at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism analyzed the 900 top fictional films from 2007-2016, making it the largest and most comprehensive intersectional analysis of representation in movies to date, and the results suggest little to no progress for women, people of color, people with disabilities, and LGBT people during this period, on screen or behind the scenes.

The study is a grab-bag of industry stagnation, but one of the most striking statistics has to do with race: Since 2007, there’s been a slight decrease in the percentage of white characters, yet there’s been no real change in the percentage of people of color on screen.

In other words, despite Hollywood’s efforts, according to the study’s authors, “activism and awareness have generated little real or lasting change” in who gets to be in the movies.

Here are some key findings from the study:

• Gender: Only 34 of the top 100 films in 2016 had a female lead or colead, mirroring an industrywide plateau in the percentage of female speaking parts, which has hovered around 30 percent since 2007. Even when they do get on screen, women were portrayed in a sexualized way, appearing in sexy attire at nearly five times the rate of men in 2016.
• Race: The percentage of people of color on screen has not changed since 2007, with white people still making up 70 percent of the 39,788 characters considered in the study. Latinos were the most underrepresented of the underrepresented racial/ethnic groups, making up 3.1 percent of speaking characters even though they’re 17.8 percent of the U.S. population.
• LGBT: Between 2014 and 2016, the number of gay characters on film tripled, from 12 to 36, but despite these gains, 76 percent of the top 100 films in 2016 still had no LGBT characters, and in the remaining 24 percent, almost all of them were white.
• Disability: Disabled people, and especially disabled women, were even less visible over this period, clocking in at just 2.7 percent of speaking characters analyzed by the study, with two-thirds of them being men.
• Behind the scenes: Behind the camera, things weren’t much better. Looking at the teams who made the 900 films, only 4.1 percent of directors were women and 5.6 percent were black or African-American.