The report is comprised of mostly statistics - specific statistics, that compare different years so that we are not just getting these numbers out of context - for example, "Females comprised 29% of major characters, down 4 percentage points from 2011, but up 2 percentage points from 2002." While this is all great information, and tells us a lot about the state of the film industry right now, their statistics could do well to have a lot more discussion involved, for example why this may have changed between years, and speculation of how it may change in the future. There are less solid points than would have been expected from a report. On the one hand, the viewer is free to make whatever opinions and thoughts they want to about the statistics, which could be useful for those choosing to stay more objective, but this report has to potential to work extremely well to show exactly how big the problem is, but doesn't.
There is even a diagram of percentages of female to male characters in the report which shows the huge gap between both genders even better than reading through a page full of statistics, but only facts rather than points are made, which makes me feel that this report is lacking a little too much. Obviously it's purpose is to inform rather than persuade, but even just creating that discussion and speculating on what this information actually means, and how it could be used to help the industry would make for a much more informative piece.
The article itself does get it's point across that there is a huge gap between the percentage of genders in certain roles though, and even goes on to show how they are portrayed, like "Male Characters were much more likely to have work-related goals than personal life-related goals (75% vs. 25%). In contrast, the goals of female characters were split more evenly between work-related and personal life-related goals (48% vs. 52%)." It is certainly one of the more in depth reports that I have seen statistic wise, rather than just showing us the percentage of protagonists that are female compared to male; even if almost 50% had been female now, that does not necessarily mean things have improved. If all of those characters were portrayed in the same way, then that would arguably be worse than half of that number of protagonists who all act in diverse ways.
It also tells us the percentage of males to females as leaders in films, with a staggeringly low number of females in and kind of leading role - which again tells us a lot more about the perception of females in the film industry, and the sort of ideas/assumptions that many film goers will end up with. Another downside of the report, however, is that is does not specify whether this is in regards to the top 100 films in 2013 in America as opposed to the whole world, which could potentially yield different results. Since it is not clarified, it could be said that it would mean the world in general, but then a lot of articles written in America are aimed at Americans, and so go under the assumption that their readers would assume that the report is talking about American films only. If it is in fact regarding all films in the world (though a lot of the highest grossing ones would still then be very likely American as they tend to be released in many more places in the world), another interesting point in the topic could be in which countries do the films have more female characters as opposed to males.
All in all, the report was informative and did what it was supposed to do which was give facts. It would benefit from some sort of discussion or conclusion of the facts, but it is a piece worth considering when it comes to the topic of binary gender representation. The last criticism that I have is that though the writer obviously comes from a place concerned about the representation of gender if film (Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film), there are no obvious sourced noted in this report, which means that not all information can be verified, and therefore may not necessarily be valid or correct.
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