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Friday, March 29, 2024
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Actress Geena Davis promotes women in media at All-American Weekend

Academy Award winner and activist Geena Davis spoke about the need for greater gender equality in the media at AU’s All American Weekend.

Often recognized for her roles in movies such as “Beetlejuice,” “A League of Their Own” and “Thelma and Louise,” Davis has spent the last several years pushing for more female roles in TV and movies.

In an effort to bring more attention to the need for gender equality in children’s TV and movies, Davis established the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2007. The institute has since amassed the largest amount of research of any organization on gender roles and prominence in the media.

Davis was originally inspired to start the institute after noticing a gap between the number of women on screen compared to men while watching TV and movies with her daughter. Seven years later, Davis said she is motivated to continue the institute’s work because of the positive impact she sees it having on producers in Hollywood.

“We can go directly to the people creating the content, so I don’t need to raise the entire public’s awareness until they demand more female characters,” Davis said backstage prior to the event. “I can just go straight to the networks and the writers guild and say, ‘Hey, why don’t we just talk about this privately?’ I think it’s partly because we’re talking about what kids see, so people inherently feel a responsibility to put more thought into it.”

While she continues her work with the institute, Davis said the main obstacle she and other activists for media equality face is keeping the issue on the forefront of the public’s mind. Davis brought the audience’s attention to the challenges facing women in the media through a slew of statistics and facts showing the grim reality of women’s representation in entertainment as well as politics.

Davis highlighted the fact that in movies featuring crowd scenes, women make up only 17 percent of the group. For politics, she brought up that the U.S. ranks ninetieth in the world for the number of women in elected office.

“As Americans, we’re used to thinking of ourselves as blazing the trail for progress, but we’re profoundly not in this case,” Davis said during her speech. “And the fact is that women are seriously underrepresented across nearly all sectors of society.”

Although this lack of representation continues to be a chronic problem, Davis praised the recent trend, especially in Disney movies such as “Tangled,” “Brave” and “Frozen,” for stronger and more prominent female characters. However, she cautioned that both the industry and the public should not become complacent with women’s progress.

“When movies starring women come out people think they’re done,” Davis said.

Reflecting on an expansive career that has included a variety of roles, Davis said she now realizes that she chooses to play women who are in control of their own choices. This includes the role Davis still wishes to someday play – former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

“I’ve always wanted to play characters who are in charge of their own fate,” she said. “I’d rather play baseball than be the girlfriend of someone playing baseball. At first it was unconscious, and now it’s very conscious that I really want to play characters that are an important part of the plot and get to make decisions.”

kmagill@theeagleonline.com


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