Where the Girls Aren't

Geena Davis has am impressive portfolio of strong women she's played over the years, but looking at today's movie landscape, one is hard pressed to find strong women present in any film–from G-rated kid flicks to R-rated action thrillers–female heroines have vanished. 

Troubled by this gross imbalance of male to female characters, coupled with a concern for what this imbalance is teaching girls today–not the least of whom is her 10-year-old daughter–Davis founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media as a research-based organization to begin gathering data to back up what she’d discovered. 

Here's one of its findings:

Earlier this month at its Third Symposium on Gender in Media, the Institute released its most recent study, in conjunction with Dr. Stacy Smith from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, and revealed a children’s media landscape where men work and earn prestige—while female characters are sidelined or not given speaking roles at all. The study evaluated gender roles and occupations by looking at the 129 top-grossing family films between 2006-2011; prime-time TV in the spring of 2012; and kids' shows airing in 2011. Female characters only had a third of the speaking roles. Women held only 20.3 percent of all jobs in family films.

Davis has also started a campaign to empower girls, based on the idea that “if she can see it, she can be it.” Davis believes that a woman's future begins with how she pictures herself as a child.

Check out the video here:

Read the full article from Good magazine: 
Where the Girls Aren’t