Hollywood effectively operates as a "straight, white, boys' club" according a new report by the University of Southern California.
With the Oscars now just under a week away, a new report has condemned the entire movie industry as suffering from an “inclusion crisis” that runs all the way from movie extras to Hollywood bigwigs.
A new study published by the University of Southern California claims that access to women, minorities and LGBT people is restricted across pretty much the whole industry, calling it an “epidemic of invisibility” and saying that Hollywood “still functions as a straight, white, boys’ club”.
Taking 109 movies released by the major media companies and studios in 2014, as well as 305 scripted TV and digital series and 11,000 speaking characters, every company surveyed earned a failing score on inclusivity based on the proportion of women, minorities and LBGT persons either on screen or working behind the scenes.
Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs has vowed to implement changes, but a new report suggests an "inclusion crisis" spans the whole of Hollywood
One of the study’s authors, associate professor Stacy Smith, said to the Associated Press in a statement: “the prequel to #OscarsSoWhite is #HollywoodSoWhite… we don't have a diversity problem. We have an inclusion crisis.”
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Among the results spanning every movie and TV project analysed included findings that: only a third of speaking characters were female; just under 50% did not include a single Asian or Asian-American characters, 20% without any black characters; and that of all characters over the age of 40, 74.3% were male.
Perhaps most significantly of all, of all 11,306 speaking characters seen, just seven were transgendered (and four of those were from the same show).
It leads to what the report describes as a “whitewashed” movie industry. “When we start to step back to see this larger ecology, I think we see a picture of exclusion,” associate professor Smith continued in her statement to the press, “and it doesn’t match the norms of the population of the United States.”
It mirrors the findings of a similar report published in January by the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film, which found that just 9% of Hollywood’s highest-grossing movies were directed by women – exactly the same percentage as in 1998.
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