The numbers are compelling. In 2023, just 12% of directors credited on the 100 highest-grossing US feature films were women. Twenty-six were from "under-represented racial or ethnic groups." Of these, four were women of color. At the height of Hollywood's awards season, which culminates in the Oscars ceremony on March 10, these results come as a distinctly lukewarm shower for those who, in the wake of the #metoo movement in 2017 and #OscarsSoWhite in 2015, had imagined the American film industry capable of profound reform to make way for a more feminine, diverse and representative cohort of artists and producers. The success of Greta Gerwig's Barbie, the first film directed by a woman to break the billion-dollar box-office barrier, has served as an alibi for an industry where diversity is still no more than a façade.

Published at the beginning of January, this study comes from a research group working on quantifying efforts to include minorities in the film industry. As part of the Communications and Journalism Department at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative (AII) has been examining and comparing this reality against the idealistic aspirations of communication professionals.

With the help of 200 students, 15 full-time employees analyze an average of 1,500 films and several hundred TV series annually. They paint a picture of the industry's progress, stagnation and regression by focusing on specific subjects. Their analysis encompasses the representation of children, teenagers, people with disabilities, Muslims, members of LGBTQIA+ communities, people aged 60 and over and women in television and film. Additionally, they scrutinize the presence of minorities behind the camera, whether as directors, producers, film music composers or special effects supervisors. Nothing escapes their attention.

The strength of their method lies in the choice to examine not only the quantity, but also the quality of these representations. In 2023, a study entitled "Representation of Native Americans in 1,600 popular films" celebrated the release of Martin Scorsese's latest feature, Killers of the Flower Moon, which looks back at the US government's dispossession of the land and oil wealth of the Osage tribe by putting 16 years of American cinema under the microscope.

The result: Over the period, 99% of feature films did not feature a single Native American female character with a line of dialogue. Furthermore, the percentage of native characters fell from a meager 0.12% in 2017 to a paltry 0.08% in 2022. In November, another study looked at "the erasure on screen and behind the camera" of Hispanics and Latinos and obtained the same results: An average of 5.5% of film characters are of Hispanic origin, even though they account for almost 20% of the US population.

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