At the Women’s Foundation of Colorado, Academy Award-winning actress Geena Davis spoke about gender stereotyping in films and her personal career experiences with the issue. Her nonprofit, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, works with industry producers to increase and strengthen depictions of women in entertainment for children 11 and younger.
[Thelma And Louise] brought home to me in a big way how few opportunities women have to feel strongly about characters like this in movies. The ratio of male to female characters has been the same since 1946. There’s something very comfortable or familiar to creators about a 3-, 4- or 5-to-1 [male-to-female] ratio. I know as a kid there weren’t really any women TV characters I wanted to emulate; my best friend and I used to pretend to be the male characters on The Rifleman. We [also] had I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched.
Noting that both iconic domestic sitcoms featured husbands trying to stop their wives from using their magic powers, Davis deadpanned:
This happened in several of my marriages.
OH. Incidentally, the women who played in the All-American Girls’ Professional Baseball league—which inspired the Davis-starring modern classic A League of Their Own—are reuniting this weekend!
‘Geena Davis: “Gender inequalities are deeply entrenched”‘ [Oh No They Didn’t]