Gender and G-Rated Movies

Via Andrew Sullivan, the organization See Jane recently released a study of the portrayal of males in G-rated movies titled "G Movies Give Boys a D: Portraying Males as Dominant, Disconnected and Dangerous". Some of the highlights:

• There are three male characters for every female.
• Fewer than one out of three (28 percent) of the speaking characters (real and animated) are female.
• Less than one in five (17 percent) of the characters in crowd scenes are female.
• More than four out of five (83 percent) of films' narrators are male.

...males are less likely than females to be portrayed as parents and...nonwhite males are way less likely to be portrayed as parents. In addition, Black and Hispanic males are extremely scarce in G-rated films (they appear at well under half their actual rate in the general population), and when they are present they're far more often portrayed as violent than white males.