Damning study finds a ‘whitewashed’ Hollywood

Published Monday by the Initiative Media, Diversity and Social Change in the School of Communication and Journalism Annenberg University of SC, the study offers a thorough analysis of the film industry and television, including a “inclusion index” for 10 major media companies, Disney Netflix, nearly all of which received a poor rating.

While that may sound like things are better for female actors in TV, the studio also found they were more likely to be shown at least partly naked in broadcast, cable and streaming content than in film.

Just days before the Oscars, a new study is shining a harsh light on the lack of diversity in Hollywood.

The study, titled the Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity, examined the 109 films released by major studios in 2014 and the 305 scripted, first-run TV and digital series across 31 networks and streaming services that aired from September 2014 to August 2015.

When the group looked behind the cameras, it says it found that women and minorities were also underrepresented as directors, writers and show creators in the industry.

Last summer USC conducted an extensive study on Hollywood diversity, putting dire numbers on a fact we already know: Hollywood is white AF.

The researchers analyzed the executive ranks and entertainment offerings of 10 major media companies-21st Century Fox, CBS, Comcast NBCUniversal, Sony, The Walt Disney Company, Time Warner, Viacom, Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix-to see how inclusive they were. “There’s a much different audience for TV: more diverse, much wider, and they have to study their audience more”. That number was even lower for film, where women fill just 28.7 percent of all speaking roles.

It is also revealed that the diversity in Hollywood is under the scrutiny of after Oscars body the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences failed to nominate people of colour for acting awards for a second year in a row.

— Among characters 40 years of age older, 74.3 percent were men and 25.7 percent were women. More than 34 percent of white female characters called for full or partial nudity, compared with 29 percent of African-American characters and 28 percent of Asian characters.

Film studio heads were 94 per cent white and 100 per cent male, while senior managers were 92 per cent white and 83 per cent male. Women made up only 3 percent of film directors, and 10 percent of film writers.

Smith, along with her team of more than 100 undergraduates, found that females are underrepresented on screen across the entertainment ecosystem. Only seven transgender characters were represented in the sample, and four of those characters were in the same series. This is below (-9.6 percent) the proportion in the U.S. population, which now stands at 37.9 percent. The percentage of female, minority and LGBT characters, as well as female writers, directors and show runners at Hulu, Amazon, Disney and the CW all exceeded 65%.

While the Academy Awards have instituted new reforms to try to evolve their notoriously white, male and elderly voting population, the USC study has its own solutions in mind for what could be described as a #HollywoodSoWhite crisis.