When we think of Hollywood, we think of women in large dresses on red carpets giving anecdotes about their upcoming movie. On the red carpet, women are the stars of America's film industry, but on the screen, they only star in 15 percent of films. And that percentage hasn't gotten any better since the 1930s. Hollywood has a gender problem. The movies produce vastly underrepresent women and portray them in ways that place them as inferior to their male co-stars. This goes back to the earliest years of the film when a misguided notion that viewers prefer male leads and a now-obscure set of internal censorship rules institutionalized gender problems the industry has yet to address, problems that have implications well beyond movie theaters. We all know movie stars. They play iconic roles that engrain them in the public imagination. Their words are listened to. Their actions are watched carefully. Whether we like it or not, movie stars define our cultural references for generations. In a perfect Hollywood, discussions of "representation" — a better balance of diversity in movies and on TV — wouldn't be necessary. In that perfect Hollywood, the protagonists of movies and TV shows would be as diverse in terms of race, economics, sexuality, and gender as the world is. So would the people behind the scenes. But the real Hollywood is still an old boys club. White men are by far the most visible and iconic members of the film and TV industry. Gender representation is dismal: just 10.7 percent of movies produced between 2007 and 2012 featured casts that had equal men and women. Women still only accounted for 15 percent of leading roles in 2013. On top of that, only 30 percent of speaking roles in movies went to women. And those characters too often are placed in positions of inferiority or submission. They don't make their own decisions or control their own destinies. Movies with a female director “employed greater percentages of women writers, editors, cinematographers, and composers than films with exclusively male directors. That Hollywood’s top women are taking control is especially important when you look at the statistics. In the US, women comprised just 8% of directors working on the top 250 US domestic grossing films in 2018. That’s actually 1% below the number in 1998, and if you narrow it down to the top 100 grossing Hollywood films, the figure drops to just 4%. In the 90 years that the Academy Awards have been running, only five women have ever been nominated for the best director Oscar, and only one has ever won (Kathryn Bigelow in 2010 for The Hurt Locker). This is not for a lack of talented women in the industry. Around the world, there is an upward trend in the number of women directors taking on bigger and better projects in Hollywood, Bollywood, Nollywood, and beyond. The Wedding Party, Nigeria’s highest-grossing movie of 2016, was directed by female filmmaker Kemi Adetiba. In China, women directed three of the top 10 grossing movies of 2018, one of which earned a whopping 1.36 billion yuan ($204 million) at the box office. The gap is in fact closing on the gender inequality divide in Hollywood movies as well as in other film industries. The rise in streaming platforms and the popularity of the multi-episode series seems to be opening up opportunities for female filmmakers around the world. In India, several upcoming Netflix films are led by women including Guilty, directed and written by Ruchi Narain, and Ghost Stories, directed by Sooni Taraporevala. This evidence ultimately proves that men dominate Hollywood: In a 2019 survey on the top 250 highest-grossing films: a good percentage of women did not feature in movie roles. In conclusion, the statement that men have dominated Hollywood movies is true as supported by the evidence above.
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