Caught Caring: The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media
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It’s often easy to forget that lifelong beliefs about gender and race can be shaped by something as innocent as a cartoon. Several years ago, when Geena Davis began watching preschooler television programming and G-rated movies with her now 7 ½-year-old daughter Alizeh Keshvar, she was shocked not so much by what she saw — but instead by what she didn’t see.
“It jumped out at me,” she recently explained to the Sydney Morning Herald. “There was this huge gender gap.”
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Admittedly — as the star of the girl-centric smash hit Thelma & Louise — the 54-year-old actress says she has a “heightened awareness of the paucity of parts for female actors.” That the practice had filtered down to kid programming came as somewhat of a surprise to Geena, however, who adds,
“You just expect Sesame Street took care of everything and now it’s all educational. So I thought, ‘You know what? I would like to know the facts.’”
She wasn’t alone. Shortly thereafter the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California began analyzing the portrayals of male and female characters in 101 of the top-grossing G-rated movies from 1990 to early 2005. The study — which Geena helped raised funds for — ultimately revealed that girls made up just 28% of all speaking characters. Minorities were also drastically underrepresented, with 85.5% of all characters being white.
With the goal of supporting positive change and the belief that a fair representation of female characters would advance gender equity and women’s empowerment, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media (GDIGM) was created in 2007. It focuses on getting more females into movies, TV, and other media aimed at kids 11 and under, while also serving as a resource for the entertainment industry as a whole.
Click below to read about Geena’s recent appearance at the United Nations.
GDIGM’s efforts have not gone unnoticed; On Monday, Geena was invited to deliver the keynote address during the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) special event “Engaging Philanthropy to Promote Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment.”
She told those gathered that “at the dawn of a new millennium, in a world that is over 50% female, the message the media sends is that women and girls have far less value than men and boys.” She later added,
“The invisibility, hypersexualization and disempowerment of women and girls in media cry out for change.”
To find out how you can get involved in GDIGM, click here.
In addition to Alizeh, Geena is mom to 5 ½-year-old twins Kian William and Kaiis Steven. All three are her children with husband Reza Jarrahy.
