Press Conference on Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media

 

Replacing the abundance of sexy, racy images of women and girls in children’s television shows and films with diverse, true-to-life female characters would contribute towards efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals on women’s empowerment and gender equality, Geena Davis, founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, said Monday during a Headquarters press conference.

“As we work toward improving the status of women and the respect that women deserve, we should also think about the message that the media is sending about women and girls, particularly the hyper-sexualization and the disempowering images we often find in the media,”  said Ms. Davis, an Academy Award-winning actress.

Young people in countries everywhere, from Albania to Zambia, were watching United States-made children’s television shows, videos and films with too few female characters, she said, noting that since 1947 there had been only one female character for every three male character in programming.  Even worse, the female characters in G-rated movies for children largely reinforced decades-old gender stereotypes, wearing the same amount of sexually revealing clothing as female characters in R-rated films.

“The idea that we’re gradually getting better and that things are moving in the right direction is not true,” she said, stressing that the current on-screen trend would likely influence the next generation to view women as lesser than men.

Ms. Davis’ Institute was working with writers’ and directors’ guilds, and other entertainment companies in Hollywood to increase the number and diversity of female characters in programming.  It also recently partnered with the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) in efforts to create a more gender-balanced society.

Earlier in the day, Ms. Davis presented to the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) the report of an ECOSOC special event in February on engaging philanthropy to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment.

On a question about how female characters were portrayed in children’s programming in the developing world and her work there, she said that children in developing countries received the same negative messages as children in the United States because 80 per cent of the programming children viewed worldwide was produced in the United States.  Her Institute’s focus was on United States-made programming.

Concerning her work with UNIFEM and the proposed United Nations gender entity, she said her Institute had just partnered with the Fund, and they had no specific shared programmes in place yet.  She expected the two organizations to develop joint projects in the future, and her Institute would work with the gender entity after it was formed.

Regarding the right of entertainment content creators to free expression, she pointed to a study in Germany on children’s media, which revealed that, despite animators’ ability to create a variety of female characters, most had chosen characters that were very thin, with hour-glass figures.  Another study revealed that children were not attracted to such figures and were in fact more comfortable with normal-looking characters.  Boys in particular were turned off by very thin female characters.

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For information media • not an official record