Representation for Women on Screen Reached Parity in 2024, but People of Color Led Far Fewer Films

As you may have heard earlier today, representation for women on screen had a record year in 2024. For the first time, movies with female protagonists reached parity with male protagonists among the top 100 grossing films of the year.

Those were findings as reported in an annual study from Dr. Martha Lauzen at San Diego State University, but coincidentally, they were also similar findings as confirmed by a competing report by Dr. Stacy Smith at the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, also released today. The Annenberg report, titled “Inequality Across 1,800 Popular Films,” noted that 54 of the top grossing films of the year had a female lead or co-lead, up from just 30 in 2023.

Dr. Smith also analyzed the slates of individual studios and found that Universal Pictures featured the highest percentage (66.7 percent) of female-identified leads/co leads, followed by Warner Bros. Pictures (55.6 percent), and Lionsgate (54.5 percent). Sony Pictures fared the worst, as 38.5 percent of its films across the 100 top movies last year featured a girl/woman in a leading role (only one of those was “Madame Web”). But they were strong numbers across the board and show real progress.

“This is the first time we can say that gender equality has been reached in top-grossing films,” Dr. Smith said in a statement. “In 2024, three of the top five films had a girl or woman in a leading role, as did five of the top 10 films — including the No. 1 film of the year, Disney’s ‘Inside Out 2.’ We have always known that female-identified leads would make money. This is not the result of an economic awakening, but is due to a number of different constituencies and efforts — at advocacy groups, at studios, through DEI initiatives — to assert the need for equality on screen.”

Smith wasn’t giving out all the ballyhoos just yet. Representation for people of color on screen took a nose dive in 2024 compared to 2023, and Smith argues that Hollywood shouldn’t have to choose between the two. Just a quarter of the top 100 this year had leads coming from a racial or ethnic group, compared to 37 in 2023, though it was a comparable number of underrepresented women compared to 2023.

“While this year’s findings mark a historic step towards proportional representation for women there is still work to be done for women of color,” said Katherine Neff, the study’s lead author. “Another 17 years would be too long to wait to see the full range of women, their stories, and their voices brought to the biggest screens.”

Both the USC study and the SDSU study also made the observation that of the female protagonists, only eight of them featured women over the age of 45, while men over 45 had far more opportunities, another age-old (pun intended) problem. Films like “The Substance,” “Thelma,” “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” and “Babygirl” proved there’s a market for such actresses.

It’s a bit of inside baseball, but both studies have had something of a healthy rivalry for years. SDSU’s dates back with data to 2002, and USC’s dates back to 2007. Each iteration of each study tries to beat the other to press, sometimes releasing their latest reports literally after midnight on January 1.

That’s not to say both studies can’t co-exist, and they each come at their analysis of the top films in slightly different ways. SDSU’s analyzes women across all speaking roles or as “major” characters, and it also doesn’t include movies with ensembles as explicitly female-led. USC’s study on the other hand does a good job of breaking down studio slates and which have more work to do.

Neither of these studies however look at streaming-only titles via Netflix or other platforms, which could skew the overall results.