With Barbie becoming the highest grossing film of 2023, helmed by Greta Gerwig and focused on a diverse cast of women, some may have thought that its success reflected more diversity and inclusion in film that year.
But, according to the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative‘s 2023 annual report, that wasn’t the case.
The study found that fewer girls and women had leading roles in the top-grossing 100 films 2023 compared to the same sample in 2022, falling to 30 percent, a 14 percent drop from the year before, and on par with stats from 2010.
“No matter how you examine the data, 2023 was not the ‘Year of the Woman.’ We continue to report the same trends for girls and women on screen, year in and year out,” said Annenberg Inclusion Initiative founder Stacy L. Smith in a statement. “It is clear that there is either a dismissal of women as an audience for more than one or two films per year, a refusal to find ways to create meaningful change or both. If the industry wants to survive its current moment, it must examine its failure to employ half the population on screen.”
Annenberg has analyzed the top 1,700 grossing films from 2007 to 2023, with a particular focus on the top 100 movies of 2023, examining a total of 75,328 speaking roles to explore the portrayal of gender, race and ethnicity, LGBTQ+ identity and characters with disabilities
Only 11 percent of 2023’s top films were gender-balanced, or featured girls and women in 45-54.9 percent of speaking roles. Less than one percent of characters in 2023 were gender nonbinary.
The report also noted a decline in intersectional inclusion. Girls and women of color led only 14 films in 2023, down from 18 in 2022, but higher than the one movie in 2007 that featured a woman of color protagonist. Only one movie in 2023 starred a woman of color aged 45 or older in a leading role.
The report includes an “invisibility analysis,” which looks at how many of the 100 films examined were missing girls and women from specific racial and ethnic groups.
In 2023, 99 of these 100 films were missing female characters who are American Indian/Alaska Native or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders. Additionally, 81 films did not include a Middle Eastern/North African female character, 62 films did not feature a Hispanic/Latina female-identifying character and 56 films failed to depict a multiracial girl or woman. Furthermore, 49 films did not feature an Asian female character, and 39 were missing Black female characters. By contrast, only 12 movies did not include any white girls or women on screen.
In terms of behind-the-camera inclusion, the percentage of women directors behind top 2023 films (12 percent) was not markedly higher than 2022 (9 percent) but was up significantly from 2007’s 3 percent.
The study found that there were 98 individual women helming films between 2007 and 2023, compared to 878 individual men over the same period. Only 25 of those were women of color. Since 2007, there have only been 123 films made by women. In 2023, only 12.1 percent of directors behind the 100 top-grossing films were women, with 87. 9 percent being men. In terms of racial diversity among filmmakers in 2023, only 21.6 percent were from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, while 78.4 percent were white.
A similar issue was found among the writers of 2023’s top-grossing films. Out of 303 writers, 84.8 percent were men, while only 15.2 percent were women. The study notes that this hasn’t changed much throughout the years, as the percentage of women with writing credits in 2022 was 16.3 — only increasing slightly from 2007’s 11.2 percent.
Across genders, there was a slight increase in diverse ethnic representation among protagonists, with 37 movies featuring a lead or co-lead from an underrepresented ethnic or racial group, up from 31 in 2022. However, this progress is only slightly better than the 35 films with such representation in 2021.
Across all speaking characters, Annenberg found, the percentage of white characters decreased significantly from 62 percent in 2022 to 56 percent in 2023, both down from 78 percent in 2007.
The percentage of Asian characters, however, increased significantly from 2007 to 2023, going from 3 percent to 18 percent, but this is up only slightly from 16 percent in 2022. The report finds no other significant changes for other racial/ethnic groups over 17 years.
But the percentage of underrepresented characters (44 percent) is similar to the percentage of the U.S. population that identifies with an underrepresented racial/ethnic group (41.1 percent).
As for portrayals of disability on screen, only 2.2 percent of all speaking or named characters were depicted with a disability across the top 100 films in 2023, on par with 2015’s 2.4 percent. Forty-two films were missing characters with disabilities, while 75 films were missing female characters with disabilities.
When it comes to LGBTQ+ inclusion onscreen, 2023 saw no transgender characters among the top-grossing films of the year. There were also fewer queer characters overall than in 2022, which had 87 LGBTQ+ characters in the biggest films of that year. Last year’s top movies featured 60 LGBTQ+ characters: 20 were lesbians, 31 were gay, eight were bisexual and only one was of another sexuality.