News Archive
AAFCA To Celebrate Women In Cinema With Events Honoring Stephanie Allain, Madeline Di Nonno
With March being Women’s History Month, the African American Film Critics Association (AAFCA) will celebrate women in cinema with events in Los Angeles and Atlanta on March 23, honoring veteran producer Stephanie Allain and Madeline Di Nonno, an exec with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. “Both Madeline and Stephanie epitomize the resiliency and excellence women have long demonstrated within the industry,” AAFCA President Gil Robertson said in a statement. “AAFCA is honored to be able to share their genius on the same day in two different cities and show young people in particular, women especially, that their future in Hollywood is especially bright.” Read More…
What Would a World Without Sexism Look Like? 26 Women Sound Off
Glamour asked 25 women to imagine what would happen if the sexism that’s held us back for centuries just…disappeared. What if it evaporated? What would our lives be like then? From Melinda Gates to Taraji P. Henson to Kate Upton to three 2020 presidential candidates, here’s what they came up with. “If sexism didn’t exist, my daughter would never have had to learn that women are considered second-class citizens in the world. As it was, she first learned about sexism at four years old while watching Mulan with me—when a male character yells at Mulan, ‘Girls can’t be in the army!’ She was so stunned and wounded she could barely choke out a question: ‘Why can’t girls be in the army?!’ So yes, when I told her that was in the past, that girls can be anything now? More that anything else, I wish that that had been true.” Read More…
U.S. Box Office Returns Up 55% for Female-Led Family Films Over 10-Year Period but Parity Still Far Away, Geena Davis Reports
In the wake of #MeToo, #TimesUp and heightened awareness of the dramatic gender inequity on screen, family films are far from achieving parity. According to The Geena Benchmark Report, the U.S’s top grossing family films still feature more male leads, despite global box office earnings being higher for female-led films. Read More…
Family films have twice as many male as female characters, says new study
In family films, female lead characters do the best at the box office — but male protagonists still outnumber them 2 to 1. That’s one of the key findings in a new study from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media, which looks at diversity in the top 100 highest-grossing family films (both animated and nonanimated) released between 2007 and 2017. Yahoo Entertainment got an exclusive first look at the report, which shows a strong disparity between the characters on the big screen and the young people sitting in the audience. Read More…
How Geena Davis is Fighting to Close Hollywood’s Gender Gap
Geena Davis sat down with InStyle to talk about her decades spent working to fight gender inequality in Hollywood, the research the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media is doing and the Google software that is helping to advance the Institute’s efforts. Read More…
What would Geena Davis say?
It’s a source of pride for Geena Davis, who has been fighting gender inequality and championing diversity in Hollywood, that some producers now ask when they cast actors and crews for their forthcoming projects, “What would Geena Davis say?” Since discovering the gender disparity even in children’s videos when she was watching one with her daughter, then a toddler, Geena has been a passionate advocate against gender imbalance in the workplace, especially in entertainment productions. Read More…
Madeline Di Nonno Re-Elected Television Academy Foundation Board Chair As New Officers Set
Madeline Di Nonno, chief executive officer of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, has been re-elected chair of the Television Academy Foundation, the charitable arm of the Television Academy. “The Foundation has made great strides in the last two years,” said Di Nonno. “We’ve expanded and enhanced our renowned educational programs and discovered via research that 90 percent of our alumni surveyed are still working in and shaping the industry. Our revamped website for The Interviews: An Oral History of Television is the largest online archive of its kind and a cultural treasure that attracts thousands of students, journalists and fans everyday. Our innovative public event series, The Power of TV, continues to focus on television’s role in creating positive social change. 2019 marks the Foundation’s 60th anniversary, and we look forward to increasing our base of support and impact on the community.” Read More…
Geena Davis Talks Tracking Hollywood’s Diversity Data, Advocating for Women in STEM, and Not Playing Role Models
Geena Davis has spent her career playing complicated, powerful women onscreen–and working behind the scenes to address Hollywood’s endemic diversity problems. In 2004, the Oscar-winning actor founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, a nonprofit research organization that tracks onscreen portrayals of women and girls. Nearly 15 years later, as her industry reckons with #MeToo and Time’s Up, Davis is continuing to advocate for change–and to collect the data that makes a difference. Her latest target: the pitifully low numbers of onscreen women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM. A recent report published by the Geena Davis Institute, funded by the Lyda Hill Foundation, surveyed the past 10 years of popular films and TV shows and found some grim numbers: Almost 63 percent of fictional characters shown working in STEM are men, and more than 71 percent are white. Read More…
Movies Starring Women Earn More Than Male-Led Films, Study Finds
“Trolls.” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” “Moana.” “Inside Out.” “Wonder Woman.” All were global box-office hits that had women in leading roles. They were also part of a broader trend. According to findings from the Creative Artists Agency and shift7, a company started by the former United States chief technology officer Megan Smith, the top movies from 2014 to 2017 starring women earned more than male-led films, whether they were made for less than $10 million or for $100 million or more. Read More…
Diversity and Gender Equality Top Whistler Film Fest Mission
This year’s Women on Top series is in two parts. Earlier this year, Geena Davis, the founder and chair of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, headlined a packed luncheon. And at the festival, attendees will hear from the institute’s CEO Madeline Di Nonno, who is also attending with the doc she produced, “This Changes Everything,” which premiered at TIFF earlier this year. In recent years, Di Nonno has noticed an increase in film festivals trying to support and advocate for intersectional women. “We’ve just seen this momentum building and building, so it’s wonderful that Whistler decided to take this on to support Canadian filmmakers and actors.” Read More…
