Geena Davis just made children’s TV more feminist

A few years ago, Geena Davis helped invent a technological tool that had the potential, in her words, to “change everything.” Since launching the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media at Mount Saint Mary’s University in 2004, the Academy Award–winning actor and advocate had been commissioning research on the representation of women and girls on screen — especially in children’s media — and sharing the results with decision-makers and content creators in the entertainment industry. Her assumption was that, once her colleagues saw the statistics, change would surely follow. But gathering the data was slow and cumbersome, and the results didn’t reflect such fine-grained subtleties as how much time women spent actually speaking and appearing on screen. Read More…