Hollywood still excludes minorities on screen, behind camera

US-based major academic study finds minorities still remain underrepresented in Hollywood movies both on screen and behind the camera.

Women, disabled people and those from ethnic minority backgrounds were among the excluded or underrepresented groups as cast or crew in the analyzed data.

The results comes from a report commissioned by the Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative (MDSC) at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, which delved into 900 popular films within a time bracket from 2007 to 2016, bar 2011 as the films in this year were covered by another study.

The report indicated that just 31.4% of speaking characters were performed by women while non-white groups made up 29.1%. Only 2.7% of speaking characters were also depicted as having a disability.

“These are sustained and systemic problems. It is impossible to look at this data without concluding that much of the advocacy surrounding on-screen representation over the past few years has not been successful,” said Professor Stacy L Smith, who authored the study.

Intriguingly, women and ethnic minority groups enjoyed low representation behind the scences.

According to the study, women accounted for only 17.8% of directors, writers and producers working on the top 100 films in 2016.

AG/AG