Geena Davis, not a linguist but still worth blogging about!

The fact that I'm blogging about the actor, Geena Davis, is linguistically-relevant for a lot of reasons. For one, she expresses strong lexical-preference for the word "actor" for her occupation, saying the definition is "a person who acts," so the cutesy "ess" on the end of words - by this she means the bound morpheme marking female gender - is unnecessary. (To drive the point home, she says she considers herself "a waiter turned actor.") She is witty, gracious, unapolegetically-female and feminist, and - not that it matters - but...GORGEOUS.

It's also relevant that I talk about Geena Davis on my linguistic-themed blog because I went to hear her speak as part of a continued ethnography I am working on (with a small team of linguists) of communicative behaviors within the Georgetown McDonough School of Business (more on this to come in later blog posts); the business school invited Ms. Davis to speak tonight.

The actor was recently inspired to start a non-profit research institute after she had children and had begun to notice the gender inequalities in the movies and shows they were watching.

Since then, the research her institute has conducted has revealed, among other things, that:

• less than 30% of speaking characters in G-rated films are female
• the average ratio of male-to-female characters in films has not changed since 1946
• the percentage of directors in Hollywood who are female has never hit double digits (it wavers from between 2-7% and had a significant drop this year)
• the animated female characters in G-rated films wear as much sexually-revealing clothing as the women in R-rated films
• the majority of animated female characters have proportions that are not physically-possible (demonstrated by exhibit A: Princess Jasmine)

(There's no way that waistline could contain stomach muscles that could hold up that head of hair!)

When asked by an audience member about how to raise children's awareness of gender bias, Geena said she likes to watch movies with her kids and lean over to ask them things like, "now, why do you think she's wearing that when she's about to go rescue someone? That doesn't seem very practical, does it?" She says that now her daughter is 9, and when Geena leans over and says, "hey, did you notice-?" She says her daughter cuts her off with, "yeah, mom, not enough girls." (The actor and founder always treated the issue as important during her talk - even critical - but never took herself too seriously.)

Perhaps my favorite fact + comment Geena made during the evening was that very often crowd scenes in movies don't feature - or feature very few - women. She shrugged and said, "so, women don't gather." 

Though the research findings are bleak, Geena's outlook is not. She said we have "every reason to hope," because as she presents the numbers to producers, directors, writers, etc., they are genuinely shocked and horrified and want to change. "It shows it's not a plot to keep women out of power," she says; it's just that we (both women and men) don't even recognize the extent of the inequality. Her goal is to simply raise awareness of the situation and trust that people will be willing and able to produce more female characters with a wider range of important and interesting roles and occupations (and, we dare to hope, realistic proportions and more practical clothing choices).