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This Changes Everything. Or Not.
This Changes Everything is a 2018 documentary about gender disparity and discrimination in Hollywood. Not to be confused by a 2015 documentary of the same name about climate change. I came across it on Netflix last night and watched it this morning while drinking my first and second cups of tea. I was looking for inspiration as I considered topics for my weekly blog post. I found it, but not quite in the way I expected.
Despite the fact that the ratio of male and female in our species is relatively 50/50, our films and TV shows primarily feature males. Females usually show up as background or in inconsequential supporting roles like the girlfriend or damsel in distress. This Changes Everything doesn’t ask you to just accept this; it lays it all out for you with cold, hard data. Geena Davis, one of the executive producers of the film and one of the interviewees, founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media specifically to do the math on discrimination and bias in Hollywood after coming to the realization that the movies and shows her young daughter was watching were utterly lacking in female characters. The evidence is in the numbers. And the numbers are frankly pathetic when it comes to equal representation across genders and races.
I was fascinated to learn that women were very involved in filmmaking in the Silent Era. They wrote, they directed, they…
