Every year for the past 23, Martha Lauzen, the founder and executive director of the Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego University, has taken on the depressing task of examining the 100 highest grossing films of the year to see what they can tell us about gender parity in Hollywood.
Her annual report, titled “It’s a man’s (celluloid) world”, has served as one of the few measurable indications of the ways in which men continue to dominate the movies on screen, in their greater bank balances and despite regular assurances from industry executives and players that they are working to change the situation.
For the first time, just when Elon Musk and Donald Trump are dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies in the US, Lauzen’s study has shown that in 2024, women achieved parity with men in terms of representation in mainstream movies. Lauzen’s research is supported by the other long-running gender parity study in the US, conducted annually by researchers at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.
Lauzen’s study found that 42% of the top 100 grossing films of last year had female protagonists — defined as the characters from whom the perspective of the films are told — with male protagonists also making up 42% of the films, the remaining 16% had ensembles at their heart. The University of Southern California study also found that 54% of films last year were led or co-led by women, up from 30% in 2023.
Lauzen said in her report that 2024, with big successes for films like Wicked, Inside Out 2, The Substance, Moana 2, Mean Girls and It Ends With Us, featured, “one of the richest slates of films featuring female protagonists in recent memory”.
“These fictional women railed against unsatisfying personal relationships and discriminatory work environments. Films such as The Substance pushed back hard against a culture that considers women disposable,” she said.
The University of Southern California study’s head, Stacy L Smith pointed out that this was “not the result of an economic awakening”, but rather “due to a number of different constituencies and efforts — at advocacy groups, at studios, through DEI initiatives — to assert the need for equality on screen”.
While this is good news for women, not all the studies’ findings are good for everyone. According to the University of Southern California study, while 37% of films in 2023 were led by people of colour, that figure dropped for 2024, with only 25% of its releases featuring a non-white lead. As Smith observes, this is still a concern and demonstrates a myopia on the part of Hollywood where, while audiences “want to see stories about women and people of colour”, studios and filmmakers seem to think that they have to choose between the two. That’s the case even though people of colour make up 41.6 % of the population of the US.
The 2024 studies also showed that despite the success of The Substance, a body horror hit about the struggles of Demi Moore’s ageing celebrity against ageism, representation on screen for women over 45 remains low compared with the space given to older male stars on screen. Only eight films out of 2024’s top 100 featured an older female lead, while 21 gave space to a male protagonist over the age of 45.
As Lauzen said in her report, this is of concern because “if we limit the age of female characters on screen, we limit the kinds of experiences and lives we see them live. Our films largely fail to take advantage of the depth of character that comes from women’s lived experiences and the added dramatic push characters confront when they know they’re in their third act.”
In a separate report titled “The celluloid Ceiling”, released last month, Lauzen found that behind the camera, gender inequality in Hollywood remains shockingly stark, with 70% of last year’s top-grossing films making space for 10 or more men in key production positions, compared with only 8% where women were in similar roles.
With a strong slate of female protagonist films headed to screens this year, including the John Wick spin-off Ballerina starring Ana de Armas, horror sequel M3gan 2.0, Frankenstein reimagined The Bride and the musical Wicked: For the Good, 2025 may prove to be another good year for female representation on screen, even as the struggles for equal representation by people of colour and older women persist, and the women behind the scenes still have a long way to go if their celluloid ceiling is to be broken.
For now, it’s good to see that despite the attacks on DEI, which the Maga orcs have blamed for everything from the LA wildfires to the recent tragic air crash in Washington, in Hollywood it’s certainly proved successful as a means for creating real change on screen. As Smith told The Hollywood Reporter, “We have to have those programmes in place because the art and the storytelling of an entire group of people is often ignored, overlooked, or not compensated in the way that they should be.”
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