Geena Davis Talks Tracking Hollywood’s Diversity Data, Advocating for Women in STEM, and Not Playing Role Models

Geena Davis has spent her career playing complicated, powerful women onscreen–and working behind the scenes to address Hollywood’s endemic diversity problems. In 2004, the Oscar-winning actor founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, a nonprofit research organization that tracks onscreen portrayals of women and girls. Nearly 15 years later, as her industry reckons with #MeToo and Time’s Up, Davis is continuing to advocate for change–and to collect the data that makes a difference. Her latest target: the pitifully low numbers of onscreen women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM. A recent report published by the Geena Davis Institute, funded by the Lyda Hill Foundation, surveyed the past 10 years of popular films and TV shows and found some grim numbers: Almost 63 percent of fictional characters shown working in STEM are men, and more than 71 percent are white. Read More…