The first film you directed was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. Things were looking good for you after film school. GROSS: Maria Giese, let me move on to you.
GEENA DAVIS THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING TV
I'm talking about family-rated films.Īnd when we looked at - when we first looked at TV shows, kids - the ratio of male to female characters on kids programs, specifically made for them, had the worst ratio of male to female characters. There's far fewer movies with a female lead character. Give us some of the numbers that you find most disturbing.ĭAVIS: Well, you know, we found that for every two speaking male characters, there's one female speaking character, and that there's an appalling amount of hypersexualization of female characters, even in G-rated movies, and the female characters are very often narrowly stereotyped, hypersexualized or not really integral to the plot. GROSS: So the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media has done a lot of research on the numbers. And it seemed that, in the 21st century, this was a horrible message to be sending and very shocking. You know, some shows are researched and all that and certainly harmless.īut this struck me very deeply that we're training kids from the beginning, from minute one of absorbing popular culture, that women and girls are not as important as men and boys, and they're not as valuable to our society as men and boys. And I think most people and certainly I did assume that kids entertainments are harmless, that they're - they might even be good for kids. But for the most part, I saw appalling gender imbalance.
You know, the "Teletubbies" are gender-balanced I don't know if you can tell. I showed her, you know, G-rated videos and little kids movies and TV shows - and, you know, obviously, there's some exceptions to that. So I sat down with her, and the very first show I turned on and watched with her, I pretty much immediately noticed something, and I thought, wait a minute - how many female characters are in this show? And I was counting on my hands as I held her in my lap, and it was horrifying, and I was absolutely stunned. I - my daughter was a toddler, and I decided she was old enough to start watching preschool shows. GROSS: How did you decide to create your institute?ĭAVIS: It was very specific, actually.
I felt very unhappy with having that sort of imposed on me by other people. I thought, this is incredibly unfair, and I don't want other people deciding that I have to work less, you know, and taking away opportunities. I was very upset and angry at that happening to me. Or did you think, oh, it's me - no one wants me anymore?ĭAVIS: Oh, no. GROSS: Did you think of it as discrimination against older women? Did you think of it as there not being enough roles for women in their 40s? Which really isn't very old. I very much expected that that would not be the case. And I also expected it to be not true anymore by the time I would get to that age. It was once there was a four in front of my age, and.ĭAVIS: You know, I had heard about that for a long time, that people said that things change when you turn 40 or when you're in your 40s, but I didn't expect it to be literal. GEENA DAVIS: Well, it was pretty dramatic. When did things start to slow down in your acting career? Geena Davis and Maria Giese, welcome to FRESH AIR. Her work led to an ongoing EEOC, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, investigation into systemic discrimination against women directors, as well as an ACLU campaign against discrimination. After feeling that she was shut out of directing because she's a woman, she became an activist. Also with us is director Maria Giese, who's featured in the film, too. She's receiving an honorary Oscar this year, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, at a special ceremony in October. She is an executive producer of and is featured in the new documentary "This Changes Everything," about how women in Hollywood are pushing for more representation in front of and behind the camera. In 2004, she founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media to get the actual data comparing the number and types of male and female roles and to use that data to convince the industry of the need for change. My guest Geena Davis starred in two movies about female empowerment - "Thelma & Louise" and "A League Of Their Own." But when she got older and roles started to dry up, she realized how unempowered women were in Hollywood.
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