Stars speak out about sexism in Hollywood but nothing seems to change

In the list of things-everybody-talks-about-but-nothing-ever-changes, sexism in Hollywood ranks right up there. But now boldfaced frustration with the status quo has reached a boiling point.

The #Oscarssowhite controversy ignited Hollywood this year after the dearth of minority faces in the major Oscar acting categories and in the entertainment industry in general hit hard again. But the debate was also about the still-lagging status of women and pay equity.

A USA TODAY analysis of nearly 200 forthcoming movies in 2016 signaled that the lack of minorities AND women in Hollywood, and especially female directors, probably will continue at the 2017 Academy Awards. Meanwhile, a flurry of academic reports has shown that diversity in Hollywood barely exists.

No A's for effort on H'wood's diversity report card

Enough is enough, say a slew of celebrities, including Oscar winners Reese Witherspoon, Patricia Arquette and the second-highest-paid actor in Hollywood, Jennifer Lawrence. They are venting, boldly and in public, about inequality in pay, power and creative opportunities for women in the entertainment business.

Now that the Academy Awards are over, they're still fuming. Last year, Arquette claimed her award with a passionate speech about pay equity for women. This year, she was still campaigning on the red carpet at the Women in Film cocktail party for female Oscar nominees.

"It’s not just about lack of diversity in film, it’s the lack of diversity in CEOs and boardrooms and any position of power. There’s a bigger conversation to be had about power-sharing," Arquette told USA TODAY.

Two-time Oscar-nominee and Emmy winner Viola Davis, speaking at a Women Making History brunch in Los Angeles in 2015, said women, including women of color, can't play roles if no one is writing them.

"I hope that this wave (continues) of seeing Taraji P. Henson, Halle Berry, Nicole Beharie, Kerry Washington, Gabrielle Union and the nameless, faceless actresses out there that the only thing that has ever separated us in this world, in this business, is opportunity," she said.

And Oscar winner Geena Davis, who launched a diversity think tank 10 years ago, says the "profound lack of female characters" in films is teaching kids to have an unconscious bias against girls.

"The concept of diversity needs to include women, not be a separate topic," Davis told USA TODAY in a recent email interview. "Films and television do not reflect the real, diverse world — and the world is 51% female."

As Melissa Silverstein, activist and writer for Women and Hollywood, a blog on Indiewire.com, notes, the day after the Oscars, the trade media reported that an open director's job for the next film in the Divergent franchise, an action picture starring young star Shailene Woodley, had gone to a man.

"A day after the Oscars, a dude got a job and girl didn’t," Silverstein says. "It's an open job, it’s a movie starring a woman, it’s an action film — how is it that a woman can’t get these jobs?"

How indeed. The time for carping is over, and the time for doing something is here, women in Hollywood say.

"The conversation feels like it is reaching critical mass," says producer Nina Jacobson, who's leading the biggest film franchise in the world, The Hunger Games.

Not that there's anything new about this: Sexism has been deeply embedded in Hollywood (not to mention the wider culture) since Hollywood was born.

Nearly a century after silent-film star and "America's Sweetheart" Mary Pickford co-founded United Artists in 1919 and was one of the original 36 founders of the motion picture academy in 1927, statistics show the status of women in all precincts of Hollywood is frozen behind that of men, who continue to dominate as studio executives, directors, writers, photographers, stars and others who run the industry.

"Believe it or not, we were doing better in 1916, when 12 women were working as directors in Hollywood," Barbra Streisand said at the The Hollywood Reporter's annual Power 100 breakfast in December. "But in 2014, almost 100 years later, only five of the 150 top-grossing films were directed by women. So gender discrimination drives me crazy."

Jennifer Lawrence and Patricia Arquette speak out about equal pay

Lately, there's a lot more data like that to replace what used to be anecdotal, says Kirsten Schaffer, director of Women In Film Los Angeles, which partnered with the Sundance Institute to found the Female Filmmakers Initiative and has just released new research on female directors.

The partnership in December emerged from a private two-day meeting of industry decision-makers with strategies to deal with inequality and the pay gap, including "unconscious bias" training across the industry, development of a "gender parity" stamp of approval for films and TV shows, protégé programs, and sending out change ambassadors to spread the word about solutions in studios, networks and agencies.

"If you look at directors, 25% of the films at the Sundance Film Festival were directed by women (between 2002 and 2014), but only 4% of the 100 top-grossing films were directed by females," Schaffer says. "What this means is that when money comes in, women go out. The higher the stakes, the less likely companies are to take a risk on a woman."

Says Silverstein: "It's all about access to opportunity, money and prestige. The big blockbuster tentpole movies (show) that the dominant narrative of our culture is the heroic-male narrative. We still believe that men are the heroes who save the day and women need men to save them."

Why is that? Increasingly, more women, and a few men, are asking.

Attention is being paid because attention-getting people are doing the asking, starting with Lawrence, the $52-million-a-year woman, according to the Forbes rankings, which makes her second only to Iron Man Robert Downey Jr ($80 million) in Hollywood paydays.

Just 25, she recently confirmed she has signed up to direct her first picture, about 1960s-era mental warfare experiments.She's done with the whole "get-along-go-along" shtick so many Hollywood women follow, she says.

"When the Sony hack happened and I found out how much less I was being paid than the lucky people with (male genitalia), I didn’t get mad at Sony," Lawrence wrote in an essay, "Why Do I Make Less Than My Male Co-Stars?," for Lena Dunham's online feminist newsletter. "I got mad at myself. I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early. I didn’t want to keep fighting over millions of dollars that, frankly, due to two franchises, I don’t need.

"But with a lot of talk comes change," she wrote of why she is speaking out now. "So I want to be honest and open and, fingers crossed, not piss anyone off."

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Oscar winner Reese Witherspoon, in a wide-ranging speech at last fall's Glamour Women of the Year Awards, said the box office success of female-led films has been demonstrated, and she's committed to making more of them with her own production company.

“Films with women at the center are not a public-service project,” she said. “They are a big-time, bottom-line-enhancing, moneymaking commodity.”

In the past few years, a long line of stars, most of them women but not all, have spoken out about equality of opportunity and the pay gap, including Amy Adams, Cate Blanchett, Margaret Cho, Mindy Kaling, Carey Mulligan, Helen Mirren, Eva Mendes, Ellen Page, Zoe Saldana, Meryl Streep, Olivia Wilde, Kerry Washington and Emma Watson.

Oscar-nominated Amy Adams told British GQ that she knew she was shortchanged compared to her male American Hustle co-stars. "I knew I was being paid less and I still agreed to do it because the option comes down to do it or don't do it," Adams said. "So you just have to decide if it's worth it for you. It doesn't mean I liked it."

Oscar winner Blanchett said in her acceptance speech last year that Hollywood needs to wake up.

"And thank you to ... those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films, with women at the center, are niche experiences," she said. "They are not: Audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people."

Davis has been so concerned about the issue she founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2006 to commission academic studies that have found a dispiriting dearth of women's faces in most of Hollywood.

Her institute announced a partnership last week with YouTube Spaces to showcase female creators in front of and behind the camera.  Changing the status quo, at least in the media, is not that complicated, Davis says.

"We can’t snap our fingers and suddenly make Congress half women, but they can be half women in the next movie someone makes," she says. "First, before you cast your movie or show, cross out a bunch of first names and change them to female. Second, wherever the script says, 'A crowd gathers,' write in the script, '… which is half female.' Bam! You suddenly have a balanced cast."

Widely admired Shonda Rhimes, the TV producer who is one of the few women who dominate on TV and who has made three hit shows starring strong black female characters, accepted the Norman Lear achievement award of the Producers Guild in January.

"It's not trailblazing to write the world as it actually is," Rhimes said. "First of all, (writing about) strong women and three-dimensional people of color is something Norman was doing 40-something years ago. So how come it has to be done all over again?"

She says too many in Hollywood think successful female-driven movies are just flukes. "Instead of just saying The Hunger Games is popular among young women, they say it only made money because Jennifer Lawrence was luminous and amazing. I mean, you go get yours, girl," Rhimes told the New York Times. "But seriously, that’s ridiculous. ... In the absence of water, people drink sand. And that is sad. There’s such an interest in things being equal and such a weary acceptance that it’s not.’’

Amy Adams opens up about the Hollywood pay gap

Still, all the talking has not yet produced enough change, says Martha Lauzen, a professor of TV, film and new media at San Diego State University's Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film.

"We do have to remember that these are large industries with entrenched attitudes and ways of doing business.  It takes them a long time to change," she says. "That said, I am not particularly optimistic that the numbers will increase substantially anytime soon without significant pressure from external sources."

Such as: The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has launched an investigation of possible discrimination against female directors in film and TV, a development that has the town buzzing nervously as the commission lines up interviews with directors.

"The secrecy of the EEOC investigation has everybody’s attention — everyone is talking about what’s happening and who are they talking to, and it's heightened the press coverage," Schaffer says. "This moment in time has been eye-opening for (male executives). They're asking themselves: 'What female directors have I hired, what female writers could I be working with?' Attention gets people to open their eyes and see things differently."

Economic power could make a big difference, Silverstein says. Women have that power; they just have to wield it at their local multiplex. "If consumers wake up and realize they only see movies about men, maybe they’ll care," she says.

"The bottom line is women equal money,"  Jacobson adds. "Women make the majority of decisions about which movies to go see, which television to watch and even which digital content to consume. Economic self-interest will prevail in the end, and only an idiot would miss the point — based on all the evidence — that there is an enormous amount of money being left on the table when we ignore women behind and in front of the camera."

Women In Film has started a hashtag campaign #52filmsbywomen to persuade moviegoers to commit to watch one film a week by a woman, on screens at home or in the theater, as a means to raise visibility of female directors, to support them at the box office and to change thinking.

Just show up, Jacobson says. And bring your friends, Lauzen adds. And be strategic.

"Consumers can help by showing up for movies that are made by and starring women," Jacobson says. "It's even better if you come the first weekend or so rather than waiting for the DVD to come out."

In other words, work the box office. Men understand that.