According to the latest It's a Man's (Celluloid) World report by Dr. Martha Lauzen, executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, male characters in films continued to exceed female characters in 2021.
According to the analysis, male characters appeared in 85 percent more films than female characters. Male characters outnumbered female characters by nearly two to one, and just 31% of films had only female protagonists. Only 7% of films had more female characters than male ones, while 8% had an equal number of female and male characters.
In 2021, the percentage of important female characters declined somewhat from 2020, from 38 percent in 2020 to 35 percent last year. Female protagonists accounted for 34% of all speaking characters in 2018, down from 36% in 2019, but solitary female protagonists grew significantly from 29% in the first year of the epidemic to 31% last year.
Despite substantial shifts in the film industry in recent years, on-screen gender ratios have stayed remarkably steady, according to Lauzen. "Despite the fact that women protagonists led several of the most high-profile films last year, including 'Spencer,' 'Being the Ricardos,' and 'The Eyes of Tammy Faye,' women made up slightly less than one third of lone protagonists."
Despite an increase in Asian and Latina parts for women, the analysis found that much of the growth was centered in a few films. When those films were removed from the equation, Asian and Latina actors' roles fell significantly or remained unchanged from 2020.
In 2020, black female characters made up 16.4% of prominent female characters, up from 13.2% in 2020. In 2021, 60.6 percent of female speaking characters were white (down from 71.0 percent in 2020), 19.3 percent were Black (up from 16.9 percent in 2020), 9.5 percent were Latina (up from 5.8 percent in 2020), 8.4 percent were Asian or Asian American (up from 6 percent in 2020), 0.3 percent were Native American, 0.5 were MENA, and 1.4 percent were of multiple races or ethnicities.
