7 depressing facts about Hollywood's atrocious diversity stats

Movies are white, movies are straight, movies are young, and movies are male, confirms a study released today by the Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Researchers looked at 700 of the top grossing films released in the United States between 2007 and 2014 and found some utterly depressing stats concerning the representation of women and minorities. Here are seven examples:

1. Women made up only 30.2 percent of all speaking or named characters in the top grossing films released between 2007 and 2014.

2. In 2014, women made up only 21.8 percent of the speaking or named characters in action and adventure movies.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

3. A mere 1.9 percent of movies studied by researchers were directed by women, despite half the U.S. population being female.

4. Only 19.9 percent of speaking or named characters were women between 40 and 64 years old.

5. Only 19 movies out of 700 had named/speaking lesbian, gay, or bisexual characters.

6. Zero movies had transgender characters.

7. 4.9 percent of speaking or named character roles in the highest grossing 100 films of 2014 were "Hispanic/Latino," despite the fact that Latinos make up 17 percent of the U.S. population in 2013 — and make up a quarter of all frequent moviegoers.

Though the Media, Diversity & Social Change study isn't the first time a critical eye has been cast on the U.S. film industry, it highlights the tokenism of what The New York Times describes as roles for "the ubiquitous black friend, the Latina waitress, the Asian storekeeper" that make up the majority of non-white roles in movies. Meanwhile, female-fronted films like The Hunger Games remain glaring exceptions to the rule.