GIRLS AND MOVIES
The Numbers
Here are the hard numbers when it comes to female characters and representation in promotional materials and merchandise in today's franchise films. Films included are The Avengers (2012), The Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Minions (2015), The Lego Movie (2014), Frozen (2013), Jurassic World (2015), and How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014).
Trailers
The average length of the trailers in this group is close to two minutes. Although male characters appear almost immediately in most of the trailers or provide a voiceover to the action even though they are offscreen, the average time at which a female character first appears on the screen is at 36 seconds—roughly a third of the way in. In many cases, the first appearance of a female character happens for a millisecond before the screen cuts away to another male character who has already appeared before, providing limited context for her role in the narrative.
The average time a female character spends on screen is only 19 seconds, and the average speaking time is only 10 seconds. This means that female characters are only speaking 8% of the time. And when they do speak, it's either only to one male character (58% of the time) or to multiple male characters (34% of the time). Most of the time, these are one-way conversations, with no response from the male characters in question. And in only one out of the 44 trailers that were analyzed does a female character actually speak to another female character- Anna, to her sister Elsa, in one of the theatrical trailers for Frozen. And like her female counterparts in other movies, Anna never actually receives a verbal response from her sister. Furthermore, in 34% of the trailers, the female characters don't even speak at all.
In 64% of the trailers, female characters are shown to be central to the plotline, but in 28% of the trailers, female characters are only present in the background or shown as peripheral to the main plot, barely engaging with the main characters. In a third of the trailers, female characters are also featured as a love interest. However, 70% of this particular group of trailers do not focus on highlighting female attractiveness or attributes at all.
Only in four trailers do no female characters appear, with multiple primary female characters shown in 50% of the trailers and 42% showing only one. Of those four, three are for Minions, but one is for Frozen, a very female oriented franchise.
Posters
Out of a total of 81 posters, 45% feature only one character, another 45% feature multiple characters, and the remaining ten percent is comprised of posters that feature only the logo (nine percent) or some element of world building or landscape (one percent).
Of the posters containing characters, over half—55%—do not even feature a female character. In fact, only 35% of the 81 posters feature a female character at all, and of the ones that do feature at least one female character, only nine percent feature more than one female character.
Male characters are given the most emphasis even though each of the eight films has at least one primary female character and four of the films actually have multiple female characters. When there are female characters present, they are featured prominently in only 21% of the posters and in the background in 12%.
Perhaps because of the genre of the films, only 5% of the posters showed primary female characters as vulnerable or scared, whereas 80% of the posters showed them as powerful or in control. In no posters were any female characters shown as love interests, and only 7% of the posters emphasized female physical attributes such as breasts.
Merchandise
A survey of movie merchandise available at eight large retailers shows that the ratio of male-focused merchandise to female-focused merchandise is even more extreme than the ratio of trailers and posters that contain female characters. With the exception of Frozen, all the other films have far more merchandise aimed at boys than girls, with almost 2000 more products. While a female character is present in 35% of the posters, if Frozen is excluded from the list of merchandise, only 20% of the available merchandise from the other 6 films contains female characters or is aimed at girls.
When Frozen is included, the total number of products aimed at girls is 4,941, and the boys’ total is 5027—a difference of less than 100. However, when Frozen is excluded, the number of girls’ products drops to 2,996 and the number of boys’ products only drops to 4,849—widening the gap from 86 to 1,853.
But the difference isn't just in the numbers. Even when there is movie merchandise available for girls featuring female characters, it's extremely limited. Often, the only options are Halloween costumes and wigs and the occasional collectible figure, rather than regular clothing such as t-shirts and backpacks. Even the Avengers collection at Build-A-Bear, which generally skews towards a more feminine audience, doesn't include any female characters, even though most of the male Avengers get multiple teddy bears. In addition, female characters are often excluded from merchandise that has group shots of characters from a franchise. To see pictures of actual merchandise, check out the image gallery, which contains both photos from in-store observations as well as online stock.
