‘This Changes Everything’ — Hollywood’s Gender Inequality Exposed
“We had one Oscar, a Fulbright, two AFI Filmmaker Grants, two Emmy’s, and what we figured out we really needed … was a penis.” ~ Lynne Littman, film director
Review of the documentary film This Changes Everything by Tom Donahue, 2018
This Changes Everything is a documentary about the systemic gender inequality and female discrimination in Hollywood. It combines both hard statistics and the uncompromising, forthright and sometimes emotional conversations with prominent females in the film industry, to lay out the wide-ranging effects of this inequality on both Hollywood and our wider culture as a whole. Hollywood productions hold significant influence over our popular culture, making it a ripe subject for our next sociological inquiry into popular culture. This week, we will adopt the critical approach to popular culture, which posits that the ascendance of certain kinds of pop culture can be explained primarily in terms of their ability to reflect and reinforce the enormous economic and cultural power of the mass media society, as well as prevailing structures of inequality.
Gender inequality in Hollywood manifests in two main forms: representation and recognition — these are interdependent concepts that reinforce each other. In terms of representation, one can look at pure numbers. Of the 100 top-grossing films of 2017, only 24% of them had female protagonists. Female characters get less than half the screen time as their male counterparts, according to the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. Among directors, the disparity is even starker — of the 1114 directors of top-grossing narrative feature-films from 2007 to 2016, there were just 45 women, or just 4%. However, representation comes not just in quantity but also the quality: women have traditionally been portrayed in film as simplistic, shallow, mono-dimensional, objectified for their sexual attractiveness. On the recognition side, we can see that over the 92 years of the Academy Awards, only 5 female directors have ever been nominated for an Oscar, or a measly 1%, and only one — Kathryn Bigelow — has ever won. In terms of financial compensation, Hollywood has one of the worst gender pay gaps, with the highest-paid male actors being paid $57.4 million and females receiving $21.8 million on average, meaning that women are only paid a shocking 38% as much as men.
Karl Marx said in German Ideology that a society’s culture and symbolic imagery reflect its economic and social structure and reproduce it over time. The current state of inequality in Hollywood certainly reflects the patriarchal social structure that we find ourselves in, so let us explore more how the forces of pop culture and capitalism continue to reproduce this.
It is often said that media not only reflects, but shapes reality. As Maria Giese puts it in the film, “Hollywood is our story-telling machine, and we rely on Hollywood to communicate our stories, to represent each other to ourselves and the world”. With nearly every American having access to the culture industry’s products through the cinema, TV and streaming, Hollywood undoubtedly shapes the dominant cultural ideology and tastes. By telling a multitude of stories, Hollywood is our lens to understanding the experience of humanity, forming our impressions of the cultural contours of the world far beyond the boundaries of our own experiences. Therefore, by the images and roles of males and females on-screen, Hollywood molds our perceptions on what is normal and expected. For most of the 20th century, women in film have been portrayed as caricatures, being superficial, helpless and sexually attractive. The latter aspect is further exemplified by the fact that among top-grossing films, 51% of the time you saw a female character on-screen, she was in a state of full or partial undress — showing how women are objectified in film. Another form of stereotyping is in their roles — always as the ‘object of desire of men’ and being ‘helpless and needing to be saved’.
Antonio Gramsci says that this ideological control of culture by the male-dominated Hollywood serves as a form of social control, a form of insidious and soft power but effective nevertheless — with new generations internalizing these stereotypes and myths. It has been shown that TV shapes impressions on gender roles from young: Girls and boys have the same idea of what they would like to be when they grow up, but this change radically at age five — due to the influence of film and TV As a result, girls are restricted in the career possibilities that they consider, leading to fewer women joining perceived-masculine jobs like filmmaking, military, martial arts, or STEM, and preventing them from discovering their true potential. Just look at how powerful film can be in shaping the aspirations of girls: In 2012, archery saw a surge in female interest — and it was not least due to two prominent movies featuring female archers — The Hunger Games and Brave. More recently, chess, another male-dominated game, saw an influx of females, after the portrayal of chess whiz Beth Harmon on recent Netflix hit The Queens’ Gambit. Media has tremendous power — it reflects our sense of identity, shapes our sense of agency. Hence, by stereotypically limiting representations of females in film, popular culture acts as social control that self-reinforces the structures of economic and cultural inequality.
There are structural, economic mechanisms through the Hollywood industry on how the male hierarchy is reinforced and reproduced. Consider that the gatekeepers and evaluators of the culture industry are predominantly male — 77% of the reviewers on Rotten Tomato, and the same percentage of voters for the Oscars. Hence, whether a movie is ‘good’ or not equates to whether it resonates in the hearts and minds of men. It’s worthy to note that for the culture industry, evaluations of quality are much more subjective than in STEM, hence bias would presumably be far more consequential. The implication is that male-directed movies, which mainly portray the narrative from a male gaze, with the associated stereotypes of females, are more likely to be highly-rated, and this explains the wide gender disparity in Hollywood accolades. With recognition comes economic rewards, in terms of corporate endorsements which further inflate male salaries, and also leads to further opportunities, such as male directors selected to direct more lucrative films. Male-directed movies have more distribution, more ad dollars spent, and their careers and directing opportunities come faster, leaving female directors of similar quality being left behind. Hence, this serves to illustrate how the incentive and reward structure of Hollywood compounds and exacerbates the social biases of males, transforming into lasting, self-perpetuating economic disparities.
With this systemic inequality in Hollywood, the end result is that everyone is worse off. For women in Hollywood, besides the injustice of realizing that their efforts are not being commensurately rewarded, there is also the indignity of being forced to conform to certain expectations that the male-dominated system has placed on them in order to succeed. Chloe Grace Moretz recounts that at age 16, she was once asked to wear a push-up bra with ‘chicken cutlets’ (silicone bra inserts) by the directors. She also recalled how when casting for Carrie, she was told by the male crew how to better portray the scene of her experiencing her first period. I can only imagine that the demeaning and constraining of women — in an industry in which quality comes from authenticity, uninhibited creativity and aesthetic sensibility — would be severely detrimental to their self-esteem and motivation, preventing them from performing at their best, as if the existing structural inequality was not enough in feeding gender disparities. Such women’s talents are thus not being harnessed to their greatest potential. Additionally, by concentrating all story-writing, directing and cinematographic direction among males, films are thus unable to reflect the diversity of lived experiences with the quality that only a diverse pool of creators would be able to achieve. Discrimination thus robs our cultural sphere from experiencing a higher quality of diversity of lived experiences, resulting in an American pop culture that is described by social critiques Adorno and Horkheimer as ‘all mass culture being identical and homogenous’.
Given the current situation, how can change happen? Many interviewees in the documentary lament how a number of movies throughout the past decades have been billed as the movie that ‘changes everything’ with respect to female representation in film, yet in the years after that progress stalls and even reverses — leading to the film’s ironic title This Changes Everything. Unfortunately, the history of Hollywood suggests that actual social change against inequality can only be brought about through two ways: the consent of the elite, or the threat of legal institutions.
Firstly, the documentary cites the example of FX CEO John Landgraf as a beacon of hope — upon reading a report that FX was the worst TV network in gender inequality, he spearheaded a comprehensive shift within the company to become more inclusive, leading to instant results — the percentage of white male directors dropped in the span of 2 years from 89% to 49%, and FX received more than 50 Emmy nominations since. Despite this ostensibly showing progress in gender equality, I would look at this from a more negative viewpoint. The fact that this white male CEO happened to be sympathetic to the cause of diversity and inclusion single-handedly changed the trajectory of FX, compared to the other studios, is a testament less to the progress of gender equality, and more of the power of of the male chief executive and his personal opinions in influencing the career experiences and opportunities of many women under his indirect control. Ultimately, real change comes when leadership and decision-making power lies at the hands of a diverse group.
Secondly, it was mentioned in the film that the only avenues for women to push for justice is through the legal system — filing lawsuits based on Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act. This highlight that economic concerns still dominate the decision-making calculus among Hollywood elites — being a profit-making industry, movements to foster diversity that don’t correlate with profit motive make slow progress, and only with the threat of legal action, and the consequent reputational and economic ramifications to the brand, will swift action be taken.
The film ends on a hopeful note, pointing the MeToo movement, which sparked significant conversation and action against female sexual harassment in Hollywood, as evidence that change can happen through social movement. Perhaps recent cultural preferences for diversity, representation and women’s rights, will aligning the economic incentives with such inclusion (recently, films such as Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel and Black Panther have been extremely successful, in no small part due to their groundbreaking portrayals of women and minorities), and at last, actually ‘change everything’ in Hollywood.
