If you want to see more women on screen, you’re going to have to get into horror movies, it seems. According to Luminate’s “Entertainment Diversity Progress Report”, horror is the genre that features the most women on screen.
The study looked at the representation of women in television series and movies released over the past two years in the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom.
Jaclyn Bethany’s “The Falling World”, released last year in the US, features nine female leads. The sixth installment of the “Scream” saga, released last month, put eight actresses in leading roles, including star of the moment Jenna Ortega and the legendary Courteney Cox.
Similarly, “The Accursed”, directed by Kevin Lewis, released in cinemas last year, featured eight female characters in the main title cast.
When it comes to TV shows, horror also has a strong female presence, notably with Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story” series. Season 10, airing in 2021, and season 11, airing this year, have 11 and four regular female characters, respectively.
Besides horror movies and series, the creations of Shonda Rhimes also put women in the limelight. Her medical series “Grey’s Anatomy” has 10 regular female characters in its season 18.
But it was “Bridgerton” on Netflix that stood out the most, both from a gender and diversity perspective. The second season of the historical romance has 15 female characters, with one-third of the regular female roles women of colour or queer-identifying.
Only the Netflix series “Control Z” cast more women on screen, with 17 regular female characters, the report notes.
“Gender diversity on screen has seen mixed success at parity over the past two years,” it adds. The percentage of lead roles played by women in film has risen from 41% in 2021 to 42.7% in 2022.
With TV series, this percentage is down from 46.3% in 2021 to 45.7% last year.
Looking at the presence of women behind the camera, the figures are far from parity, despite making progress. In 2021, 20% of film directors were women, compared with 24.5% in 2022.
With TV series, they represented a quarter of directors (24%) in 2021, compared with 28.3% last year.