A new study by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has found that women and girls made up just 30% of the leading film roles in the top-major motion pictures of 2023, representing a 14 percentage point drop from the year before.
The trend extended to women and other underrepresented groups both in front of and behind the camera, revealing an overall stagnation in inclusion efforts in the movie industry.
Only 32% of a total of 5,084 speaking characters in 2023’s top films were girls/women, according to the annual study, which tracked 1,700 movies, while 68.2% were male and less than 1% were non binary.
The girls/women number dipped to its lowest percentage since 2007, the first year of the USC study. The number of female directors, composers, writers and producers were also flat with 2022.
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