Outnumbered

Women make up roughly half of the population.  Yet, since the 1950’s male characters have outnumbered female characters in all forms of media.  Women today are still underrepresented.  As George Gerbner explains in the “Electronic Storyteller”, there is one woman for every three men on television.  An example of this would be Seinfeld.  When women appear in media they are always stereotyped and usually highly sexualized for a heterosexual male viewer audience.  Female characters are always on the sidelines, rarely seen as the main character.  Some believe this absence of well represented women on television is due to the lack of women in the high status positions, such as director or producer in media.

To deal with backlash, media moguls have created shows and movies with female protagonists.  We see gender role reversal in many of these.  Some examples of media with female leads are American Horror Story, the Hunger Games and Million Dollar Baby.  In American Horror Story:Coven, women greatly outnumber the amount of men in the show.  Also, the males are seen as the sexual objects or passive submissive helpers rather than the women.  Here, the females hold the power.  In a recent GRIID film study of the top 67 films of 2012, 55 of the lead characters were male and only 12 of the characters were female.  Strong, empowered female protagonists are far and few between. In movies with female leads, the young women are not portrayed as sexual objects but rather have their own objectives in mind.  These shows counter the overtly sexual submissive stereotype normally played by women.