A reluctance to engage in real world problem solving

It is interesting how one's perspective affects how you approach problem analysis. From Gender Inequality in 500 Popular Films: Examining On-Screen Portrayals and Behind-the-Scenes Employment Patterns in Motion Pictures Released between 2007-2012 by Dr. Stacy L. Smith, Marc Choueiti, Elizabeth Scofield, & Dr. Katherine Pieper. First they establish that there is an empirical pattern. Their research is based on the top 100 commercial fictional movies of 2012.

Females are grossly underrepresented on screen in 2012 films. Out of 4,475 speaking characters on screen, only 28.4% are female. This translates into a ratio of 2.51 males to every 1 female on screen. 2012 reveals the lowest percentage of on-screen females (28.4%) across the 5-year sample. Only 6% of the top-grossing films in 2012 featured a balanced cast, or females in 45-54.9% of all speaking roles. Just over a quarter of all narrators (27.5%) are female.

Only 16.7% of the 1,228 directors, writers, and producers are female across the 100 top-grossing films of 2012. Women accounted for 4.1% of directors, 12.2% of writers, and 20% of producers. This calculates to a 2012 ratio of 5 males to every 1 female behind the camera. Almost no changes are observed in female employment patterns behind the camera across the 5 years studied. Together, the findings show that the gender needle is not moving on screen or behind the camera in popular films.

They find this perplexing.

The under representation of females on screen is surprising given population and movie attendance patterns. Girls and women represent fully half of the U.S. population and buy half of the movie tickets sold. As we have stated before, females simply do not represent half of the cinematic sky. The lack of movement on screen is also somewhat unexpected, given the advocacy efforts of many non profits in the U.S. to increase the prevalence of and diversify the portrayal of girls and women across media.

That is interesting. It is also consistent with my observations that in any field subject to open and transparent competition, the likelihood of female participation in the top reaches of performance is bounded around 15-30%. The basic observation from the research, though, comes down to this - audiences apparently prefer younger actresses over older ones and they prefer to see more of them (flesh exposure) than they do of male actors. No great biological or sociological surprise there though it is interesting to see it documented.

What I find most interesting is not necessarily the facts they have provided, though that is valuable, but rather their mode of argument. They are essentially starting with a conclusion and working backwards to justify that conclusion rather than identifying a pattern, justifying it as a problem, and then focusing on solving that problem.

The authors appear to want to fix the gender disparity and they want to do it specifically by coercing film studios to pursue a specific action (hire more female directors and producers) despite "advocacy efforts of many non profits in the U.S. to increase the prevalence of and diversify the portrayal of girls and women across media" having failed to accomplish this over the past couple of decades of advocacy.

An experienced problem solver would look for the potential root causes of the disparity and tackle those root causes.

The researchers instead notice "that filmmaker gender is associated with how stories are told. Looking across the 5-year sample, films with female helmers are populated with more girls/women on screen and with less female sexualization." With that correlation in hand, they then conclude, "At least one avenue to diversifying cinematic content or reducing the risk of some negative effects (i.e., objectification) may be to hire more women behind the camera."

If we accept that gender imbalance and sexualization are problems to be addressed, then how do we go about solving the problem. What I find fascinating is that the researchers simply leaped at the first correlation they saw and proposed a coercive solution (make film studios use more female directors, producers and writers and the sexualization will come down and the female roles will go up).

But what kind of way to do problem solving is that? First, by their own numbers, even if all films were produced by females, you would still have females underrepresented and you would still have women oversexualized compared to men. So their proposed solution, even if feasible, would still not solve the problem. It looks like this is simply a make work solution for female directors and producers rather than an honest effort to fix gender imbalance and sexualization. What explains this?

I don't know. I am guessing that it is three-fold: unquestioned assumptions on the part of the researchers, lack of experience/context, and complexity and difficulty of addressing real root causes.

Everyone seems to assume that disparity is a consequence of bad thoughts and actions despite overwhelming evidence that ill intent is relatively rare and that disparities arise all the time out of positive individual actions (see the research of Thomas Schelling, nicely summarized in Seeing Around Corners by Jonathan Rauch.)

So how would you solve this problem as a responsible and accountable executive? Find the root causes and determine what can be done to influence those issues to arrive at the desired outcome. So what is the root cause? The researchers imply that the root cause is the behaviors of the studios, overlooking the most critical contextual issue. Studios exist to make money via the highly unpredictable process of film-making. Who determines success? The audience. If audiences don't buy, then film studios don't profit and they go out of business. Simple as that. So what is the audience buying? Based on the researcher's numbers, the American audience appears to be buying young female flesh. Is that a problem? Depends on your values. I could make a reasonably strong argument that it is but I would certainly come across as very traditional, patriarchal, and Victorian.

But the real issue is whether the suppliers (movie studios) are creating demand (for pretty young women) or whether they are merely the vessel existing to fulfill the pre-existing demand from movie audiences? Given that the movie industry is massively competitive and that the barriers to entry are coming down (plunging technology costs for film production and increased digital venues for distribution) and that the audience is capricious, the presumption has to be that the studios are seeking to respond to demand.

This has echoes of the War on Drugs. Should we be conducting this war at all? If the answer is Yes, Do we go after the suppliers or the consumers? And do we understand enough about the market for drugs, the details of production and supply, the sociology of drug consumption and the biology and psychology of drug dependency to be effective in mitigating or eliminating the problem? For the War on Drugs, thirty years of well intended effort says the answer to all the questions is no, we don't know enough to be effective.

I think the answer is the same for gender imbalance in movies. It is great to be able to establish some empirical parameters as the researchers have done. And to be fair, they do call a number of times for additional research. But none of the calls are to determine why the audience is under demanding of female roles and over focused on flesh.

A long ramble to say that this is interesting and potentially useful research but that the academy too often turns out studies that are bounded by poor critical thinking, undocumented assumptions, value systems that may not be consonant with the population at large, a tendency to grasp at straws that serve a pre-existing worldview and a reluctance to engage in real world problem solving.