Study: No change in Hollywood inequality

The Detroit News reports:

Despite widespread attention over diversity in the movie business, a new study finds that little is changing in Hollywood for women, minorities, LGBT people and others who continue to find themselves on the outside of an industry where researchers say inequality is “the norm.”

A report to be released Wednesday by the Media, Diversity and Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism offers a stark portrait of Hollywood’s feeble to nonexistent progress in eradicating what researchers call “pervasive and systematic” problems in inclusiveness in front of and behind the camera.

Since 2007, USC has analyzed the demographic makeup of the actors, directors, writers and more from each year’s 100 most popular films. Its latest addition adds data from 2015’s top films, but finds little change.

For example, 31.4 percent of speaking characters in the analyzed films were female in 2015 — roughly the same number as in 2007. That’s a ratio of 2.2 men for every single woman.

Democrat party controlled industry faces criticism for not being diverse.