News Archive

September 27, 2016

Shining a Light on Gender Imbalance in Media

While the Bechdel Test has been a positive conversation-starter in the fight towards gender equality in art, it clearly doesn’t go deep enough. How much are males dominating the screen? And are the depictions of a females on screen a fully realized portrayal of a person or a mere stereotype? The Geena Davis Institute’s GD-IQ (Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient) hopes to paint a clearer picture on a film’s gender representation, and urge content creators to fight against their unconscious biases and tell stories that are truly reflective of the world. Read More…

September 26, 2016

Geena Davis Wants to Solve Hollywood’s Gender Gap Problem With New Tech Tool

Actress Geena Davis has a new weapon in her arsenal for her decades-long battle against gender inequality in Hollywood. At a global symposium in New York City on Thursday, she unveiled the Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient (or GD-IQ). The new tool, sponsored by Google and crafted at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, can track how often women appear on screen, how much they talk and the quality of their dialogue. Read More…

September 24, 2016

Geena Davis on ‘Exorcist’ TV series reboot: We want it to be as ‘life-scarring’ as original

Geena Davis, who stars in the new television series reboot of the classic horror film “The Exorcist,” tells TODAY that the original movie was “life-scarring, and we’re trying to do that to a new generation.” She says she doesn’t have trouble sleeping after working on the show because “we’re just trying to make it so YOU can’t sleep.” She also appears to have no trouble with the world’s hottest tortilla chip (but then again, she is an Oscar-winning actress). Watch Video…

September 23, 2016

Geena Davis Talks About ‘The Exorcist’ and Women Onscreen

By her own admission, Geena Davis is not the norm when it comes to gender disparity onscreen. “I’ve been really lucky to play a lot of important roles in movies, and I got to be really cool things,” she said, ticking off a list that includes a baseball phenomenon (“A League of Their Own”), a pirate captain (“Cutthroat Island”) and, perhaps the coolest of them all, a housewife on the lam in “Thelma and Louise.” Now she’s Angela Rance, a Chicago hotel manager, wife and mother of two daughters, in Fox’s “The Exorcist,” a retooling of the 1973 horror classic with a debut on Friday. Read More…

September 22, 2016

Geena Davis on KPCC’s Talk Two

Geena Davis spoke with Take Two’s Alex Cohen about GD-IQ, the new software that breaks down representation in TV and films. Read More…

September 14, 2016

How Long Is an Actress Onscreen? A New Tool Finds the Answer Faster.

The effort to catalog the inequity in onscreen roles for women and minorities has a new weapon. The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, at Mount St. Mary’s University, with financial backing from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic division, will announce on Wednesday a tool that employs video- and audio-recognition technology, along with algorithms, to identify gender, speaking time and additional details about characters presented in films, television shows and other media. The software, called the Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient (or GD-IQ), will speed up and automate the painstaking data-collection process that researchers use to study representation, a key initiative in recent years as the entertainment industry has begun to focus on equity onscreen. Read More…

September 10, 2016

Geena Davis envisions ‘Exorcist’ as ‘the scariest TV show ever’

Geena Davis remembers when she first saw the 1973 film “The Exorcist” — and she’s not the only one. Davis’ own vivid memory was of seeing it “when I was a kid at a drive-in with my friend’s family.” Laughing loudly, she says, “My parents would have freaked out if they knew what I had watched that night. It really is the scariest movie ever. Our goal is to make this the scariest TV show ever.” Read More…

September 08, 2016

Everything you need to know about The Exorcist TV show

After years of sub-standard movie sequels, can Fox finally deliver a worthy follow-up to the 1973 horror film, The Exorcist? Academy Award-winner Geena Davis stars in the show, alongside Alan Ruck, Ben Daniels, Alfonso Herrera, Brianne Howey, Hannah Kasulka and Kurt Eqyiawan. Read More…

September 03, 2016

Geena Davis: Why She Decided To Take Part In Fox’s ‘The Exorcist’ Series

t Fox’s portion of the TCAs, Geena Davis (Angela Rance) tells Access Hollywood what made her interested in taking part in Fox’s upcoming series, “The Exorcist.” And, how different will it be from the 1973 iconic horror movie? Watch Video…

August 18, 2016

The Film Industry’s Problem Of Gender Inequality Is Worse Than You Think

So can the industry’s problem of entrenched gender inequality be fixed? It can, according to Geena Davis, Oscar-winning actress, advocate, and founder and chair of the nonprofit Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. In a recent NBC News article, she said: “When the needle moves on onscreen representation for the first time in seven decades, that will be historic. It’s the one area of great gender disparity that can be fixed instantly. We can absolutely fix it overnight, the next TV show — the next movie can be gender balanced.” Read More…

IF SHE CAN SEE IT, SHE CAN BE IT®