Hollywood Honors Diversity, Fails to Practice It

While Hollywood enjoys lecturing us “deplorables” about how racist and sexist we are, its actual record on diversity isn’t particularly grand. It’s downright awful, actually. Hollywood is just about the whitest, most male, most privileged industry in America, according to most data that’s been collected.

As far as acting is concerned, the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism published a report last year based on a comprehensive survey of 109 movies and 305 TV shows. Across 11,306 speaking roles, men had twice as many speaking roles as women. The percentage of “balanced casts” was even worse — 18 percent of stories were “gender balanced,” while film only came in at 8 percent.

Women and minorities are clearly being marginalized by the sexist and racist hiring practices of Hollywood’s hypocritical elite.

We know how the Left hates the objectification of women. Yet women in “revealing clothing” or “shown with partial or full nudity” were found in 56 percent of films, 62 percent of broadcast television shows, and a whopping 80 percent of cable programming.

The Writers Guild of America reports annually on diversity as well. Women and minorities are clearly being marginalized by the sexist and racist hiring practices of Hollywood’s hypocritical elite. Across television as a whole, women accounted for only 29 percent of hires and earn 93 cents for every dollar men earn in television. In film, however, sexism appears to be far worse — women writers only earn 68 cents on the dollar.

The Annenberg report also showed that 85 percent of the 4,284 directors were male.

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What’s interesting about these figures is that, on a national level across all industries, when controlling for all variables, women earn 95 cents on the dollar, according to the CEO of Glassdoor, a job recruiting website. Meanwhile, women account for 43 percent of the entire full-time workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It’s OK, though. Surely Hollywood has a far better record regarding race, right?

Not so much.

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Twelve percent of speaking characters in the Annenberg survey were black, 6 percent were Hispanic, and 5 percent were Asian. This compares to the latest data from the Census Bureau, showing 13 percent of Americans are black, 18 percent are Hispanic, and 6 percent are Asian. However, when examining the data on a per-story level, only 22 stories out of 414 — or about 5 percent — had balanced racial/ethnicity. Twenty-two percent of stories had no black characters at all, yet more than half had no Asian characters.

Behind the camera, the situation is even worse for minorities in Hollywood. Thirteen percent of TV writers are minorities, compared to an American population that is comprised of roughly 38 percent minorities. In film, that number drops to 5 percent. Minority writers combined only account for 7 percent of employment.

All in all, Annenberg’s study concluded: “Hollywood has a diversity problem. The film industry still functions as a straight, white, boy’s club.”

Tell us something we couldn’t have guessed. The industry shouldn’t preach if it can’t follow its own rules.

And if you thought Hollywood’s diversity problems were on an upswing, then you’d be sadly mistaken. The “2017 Hollywood Diversity Report” is set to be released by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, and it found that very little improvement had been made in film and television in regards to the representation of women and minorities.

The report’s lead author found the only progress in television and said, according to the LA Times, of Hollywood movies, “Film, however, that hasn’t really progressed.”

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The number crunchers at the studios are selling product to those most likely to have disposable income and those most likely to spend it. Yet that argument falls apart when we consider that much of conservative America is being ignored as far as palatable content goes. There’s an economic juggernaut just sitting out there that wants to see content that reflects a certain set of values — yet the studios are so entrenched in leftist ideology that they subordinate their own financial interests.

No one would harp on Hollywood’s diversity hypocrisy if its denizens didn’t crow so loudly about how diverse they claim to be — all while calling conservatives racists, sexists, homophobes, and clubbers of baby seals.