How 17 Equals 49.6: The Amazing Multiplying Women

“Why do academics think there are so many women in academia? The faculty dining room used to have no women in it. If there are now four, it looks like an onslaught,” Valian writes in an email. According to Valian, it’s the natural result of longstanding exclusion. The phenomenon is hard at work in the movies. In 2013, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media looked at 120 top-grossing films released between 2010 and 2013, and it found some problems with gender-ratio realism. Females made up about 23 percent of the average “workforce,” and about 30 percent of all speaking or named characters. Read More…