Two long-running studies published Tuesday reveal one place in America where gender parity grew in 2024: movie screens.
For the first time in the history of both studies, one conducted at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative and one at San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, top-grossing films with female leads were at least as common as top-grossing films with male leads.
The USC study found that, across the top 100 movies at the North American box office in 2024, more than half (54) featured a story that was centered on a female lead, including movies like Pixar’s Inside Out 2, led by Amy Poehler; Disney’s Moana 2, with Auliʻi Cravalho; Universal’s Wicked, with Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo; and Paramount’s A Quiet Place: Day One, starring Lupita Nyong’o. This number is significantly higher than in 2023, when 30% of movies had a female lead and more than double what it was when the researchers first started tracking the issue in 2007.
“We’re seeing a real shift in sensibility,” says Stacy L. Smith, founder of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. “This is the first time we can say that gender equality has been reached in top-grossing films.”
The news of the new benchmark for women comes as the Trump administration is escalating its drive against diversity and inclusion programs, which studios had been growing and promoting in the years since both of these studies were founded. It is still unclear how studios will respond to President Trump’s executive order aimed at cutting DEI programs among private companies, though PBS closed its DEI office this week and Disney has stepped back from some of its DEI efforts.
“We have to have those programs in place because the art and the storytelling of an entire group of people is often ignored, overlooked, or not compensated in the way that they should be,” Smith said, of the role of DEI programs in Hollywood.
The studio that released the most female-led films in 2024 was Universal, under chairwoman Donna Langley, with 10 movies, or 66.7 percent of its slate female-led, followed by Warner Bros (55.6 percent), Lionsgate (54.5 percent), Paramount (44.4 percent), Disney (40 percent) and Sony (38.5 percent).
The 23-year-old San Diego State study, called “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World” depicts a similarly groundbreaking level of gender equity on screen in 2024, with researcher Martha Lauzen reporting that 42 percent of the 100 top domestic grossing films had female protagonists, 42 percent had male protagonists and 16 percent featured ensembles.
Although 2024 saw an increase in leading roles for girls and women, the story was different for people of color. According to the USC study, just 25 of the top 100 films featured a lead from an underrepresented racial/ethnic group, a substantial decrease from 2023, when 37 leads were people of color, and well below their proportion in the U.S. population, which is 41.6 percent.
The studies also show that the gains for women were not uniform. In 2024, according to the USC study, just eight films featured a woman 45 years old or older in a lead role; by comparison, 21 films depicted a man in the same age bracket. There was only one film in the top 100 that featured a woman of color over 45 years old, Angel Studios’ Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot, starring Nika King.
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