Hollywood’s Glass Ceiling Remains in Place: Infinitesimal Increase in Movies With Female Protagonists

Viola Davis, Michelle Yeoh and Jenna Ortega may have topped the box office and won rave reviews in the likes of “The Woman King,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Scream,” but Hollywood still tended to bank on movies with male leads.

A new survey of the top 100 grossing domestic releases found that women only accounted for 33% of movie protagonists. That represented an infinitesimal two percentage point increase from 2021, according to the report by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. And don’t expect actresses to get as many lines as their male counterparts. Females accounted for 37% of all speaking characters in 2022, up 3 percentage points from 34% in 2021. Men had 63% of speaking roles, and 0.1% of speaking characters were transgender. One speaking character was non-binary.

Moreover, a whopping 80% of films featured more male than female characters. Only 11% of films had more female than male characters,