Study finds 'pervasive and systematic' issues of inequality in Hollywood

Despite widespread attention over diversity in the movie business, a new study finds that little is changing in Hollywood for women, minorities, LGBT people and others who continue to find themselves on the outside of an industry where researchers say inequality is “the norm.” A report by the Media, Diversity and Social Change Initiative at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism offers a stark portrait of Hollywood's feeble to nonexistent progress in eradicating what researchers call “pervasive and systematic” problems in inclusiveness in front of and behind the camera.

For example, 31.4% of speaking characters in the analyzed films were female in 2015 — roughly the same number as in 2007. That's a ratio of 2.2 men for every single woman. Characters identified as lesbian, gay or transgender accounted for less than 1% of all speaking parts, or 32 out of 4,370 characters studied. That was a slight increase from 19 portrayals in 2014. After finding zero transgender characters in 2014, researchers could pinpoint one in 2015. From 2007 to 2015, the study finds no significant change in the percentage of black (12.2%), Latino (5.3%) or Asian (3.9%) characters in the most popular films. Off screen, of the 107 directors of 2015 films, four were black or African American and six were Asian or Asian American. Just eight were women, still the most since 2008.