Response to the article “Geena Davis: ‘After Thelma and Louise” People nowadays do not really care if the main character of a movie is a woman or a man, or if the most characters in the movie are men. The gender distribution does not affect how interesting the movie is to the one who watches the movie. There are certain roles in movies which best suits a man and other roles which suits a woman. As a child I never really focused on which gender is most prevalent in the film industry, I simply watched the movies because they were interesting. I remember the likes of Tomb Raider and King Kong in which the main character was a woman. In the article “Geena Davis, After Thelma and Louise”, Elizabeth Day talks about how few women are in the film …show more content…
They didn’t”. Day expounds on the low number of women compared to men in the film industry and asserts that it is due to the fact that most of the people who make the decisions in the film industry are men. She mentions famous women in the film industry who claimed to have experienced sexism in one way or another such as Geena Davis, who said she experienced sexism on set but it was not directed towards her, and Anne Hathaway who said that she was treated differently because she was a woman. She refers to a research conducted by Dr. Stacy Smith at USC Annenberg which stated that from 2007 to 2014, women were merely 30.2% of the characters in the 100 top-grossing films distributed in the US and very few of those 30.2% were directed by women (Day). She compares this percentage in the film industry to other fields like law, art, politics and journalism in which women are not more than 20%. In addition, the disproportion is even worse in the off screen roles in 2013 which women were 2% of composers, 4% of sound designers, and 2% of supervisors in the 250 top grossing film (Day). She stresses that it is even worse for black women according to the same research which states that out of 565 top grossing films only two were black women (Day). Day also writes that there is an incredible amount of pressure on female directors and they often are not given a second chance. Furthermore, she states that female actresses are paid lower than their male counterparts, but actresses have started to respond recently to this gender discrimination with the likes of Jennifer Lawrence and Charlize Theron who asked for a raise in their fees and Sandra Bullock, Reese Witherspoon who both have been successful in production of movies. Elizabeth Day discusses about the few numbers of women who are in the film industry, the prevalent sexism, and argues that it is because the people in