THE ACCIDENTAL ACTIVIST

BY: Michael Arkin

Looking back from where Geena Davis stands now, it’s more than a little ironic that she made her film debut at 26 in the 1982 hit, Tootsie (in her skivvies no less), a film about a struggling actor (Dustin Hoffman) who, unable to find work as a man, poses as a woman and becomes a star. Fast forward to the present and you’ll find the actress, best known for her iconic performances in the female-driven films A League of Their Own and Thelma and Louise, and her Oscar-winning role in The Accidental Tourist, has emerged as a not so accidental activist for gender equality in entertainment targeting children and families.

“The film that actually changed my life was Thelma and Louise,” Ms. Davis said. “When we saw the reaction to that movie, it was mind-blowing. The press said, ‘This changes everything, now we’re going to see so many movies with women.’ I was like, hot dog —I’m going to be in a movie that changes everything! My next movie was A League of Their Own, where they said the same thing: we’re going to see many more female sports movies, and none of that happened. It made me realize, in a very powerful way, how few opportunities we give women to come out of a movie feeling excited and empowered by the female characters.”

That realization led her to have a profound interest in the way girls and women are depicted in the world. Years later, when her daughter, Alizeh was a toddler and the actress sat down to watch TV with her, she noticed that there were more male characters than female characters in content made expressly for young kids. “I thought surely by now we would be showing kids that boys and girls share the sandbox equally.” But when Davis started talking to content creators about it, she learned that they were mistakenly under the impression that the disparity problem had been fixed. Surprised that the people creating the content were unaware of the inequality featured in it, she realized that she needed data to prove her point. Armed with a grant from Wallis Annenberg, she founded The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.

“We’re a research institute and direct all of our efforts at the industry,” Madeline Di Nonno, the Institute’s CEO told me recently. “The beneficiaries are the consumers. We don’t do awards, we don’t shame and blame. We don’t call out anyone, but we do report on the industry.”

While the institute tracks and measures the conscious bias that exists behind-the-camera, its focus is on the unconscious bias that occurs on screen, because that’s what the viewers, many of them young and impressionable, see. They explore why there aren’t any female characters, and why the female characters that do make it onscreen are often sidelined, marginalized and hypersexualized.

“No one was talking about gender in onscreen media, nobody,” maintains Di Nonno. “There were no studies, there was nothing. It was all Geena’s observation, and she pioneered the field.”

Davis’s determination is no surprise. After graduating from Boston University, the six-feet tall Massachusetts native moved to New York where she worked as a window mannequin for Ann Taylor before joining the Zoli modelling agency. After spotting her photo in the Victoria’s Secret catalog, Tootsie director, Sydney Pollack, cast her in the comedy that went on the become the #2 movie of 1982. Her lust for life may be best illustrated by her taking up archery at 41 and making it all the way to the Olympic trials, having her first child at the age of 46, twins at 48, and winning two Oscars, including the prestigious Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her efforts to promote a more balanced representation of women onscreen.

This year, the Institute has achieved two historic goals: gender parity for female lead characters on kids’ TV, and gender parity for female lead characters in family films. “But we still have so much more to do,” Ms. Di Nonno notes. “Hyper sexualization is still 6 to 7 times more prevalent for female characters than male characters. That means females being the subject of verbal objectification, cat-calling, being depicted as body parts, not even as whole human beings, having to wear sexually revealing clothing or partial nudity and we’re talking about family content here.”

In terms of stereotypes, it can be something as simple as jobs. The industry does not show female characters having jobs or leadership positions nearly as often as male characters do. “Media can be a window into the world of work. We need to show our children that female characters can achieve these goals and have a career,” Di Nonno believes. Hence, the Institute’s mantra, ‘If she can see it, she can be it’. In yet another ironic twist, Geena Davis was the first woman to play the President of the United States on television in the series Commander in Chief in 2000. It should be noted that Polly Bergen broke the Oval Office’s glass ceiling on the big screen in the 1964 comedy, Kisses For My President.

When interviewing Geena Davis for Interview Magazine in 2016, actress Emma Watson said, “I’m always convinced that the reason that I didn’t take as many politics or history classes is because I just didn’t see any women. I didn’t think when I was 13, 14 that that had anything to do with me. I just didn’t see women in my textbooks. I didn’t see many female politicians on TV. I didn’t see women in history textbooks, so I did geography, and art and English literature. But I know I must have been affected by not seeing women represented.”

Because females are not the only group that is conspicuously underrepresented onscreen, the Institute looks at other marginalized communities. What kind of message is the industry sending when less than .08% of characters are people with disabilities and 33% of those disabled characters die in the storyline?

In 2013, the Institute, which is reliant on donations, received a technology grant from Google. Working with USC Vertibi, they developed the Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient, a cutting-edge tool that uses signal processing and machine learning to objectively process the details of movies. The device detects gender by facial recognition, tracks on-screen time, analyzes linguistics and word choice, and processes audio. Di Nonno says, “It’s one thing to say there is a female character, it’s another thing to say she is onscreen and speaking with the same amount of dialogue and the same amount of screen time as her equally weighted, top of the call sheet male co-leads.”

The Institute didn’t stop there. They wanted to create a tool to aid content creators before they start producing. Once again, working with USC Vertibi, they developed Spell Check For Bias, which can identify gender, race, age, size, LGBTQI, and disability and then flag it in a manuscript, script or ad brief, allowing them to quickly ascertain how many female characters exist in a script. Even if the underlying script does not feature any LGBTQI or disabled characters, the tool determines that there are a number of speaking parts that can be flagged prior to casting, allowing those parts to be filled by people of varying races, ages, sizes and sexual orientations. The Walt Disney Company immediately raised their hand and said that they wanted to help develop the service. Then Universal Pictures came on board with an eye on how the tool could improve the presence of Latinx characters. Spell Check For Bias, which is currently in a test mode, stands to become an invaluable tool in creating broader inclusion for groups that have, up until now, been grossly underrepresented.

With millions of kids hunkered down at home watching endless hours of television during the COVID19 crisis, the work of the Institute becomes more important than ever.

As Ms. Davis’ A League of Their Own co-star, Tom Hanks so aptly put it, “As a grandfather of three little girls who, given a fair shake thanks to Geena Davis, will follow their natural inclinations to make the world a better place for all humankind as they grow up, I thank her on their behalf.” He went on to say, “What Geena wants, Geena gets.” Good thing what she wants is equality and screen-time for all, and there’s nothing ironic about that.