Geena Davis Make A Difference For Little Girls
February 15th, 2008 by GiGiGeena Davis Makes a Difference
A little know fact is that Academy Award winning actress, [tag]Geena Davis fronts the Women’s Sports Foundation campaign Geena Takes Aim in support of Title IX — an Act of Congress focusing on equality in sports opportunities and eventually expanded to prohibit gender discrimination in United States’ educational institutions.
In 2005, Geena Davis teamed up with the non-profit group Dads and Daughters to launch See Jane (seejane.org), a venture dedicated to balancing the number of male and female characters in children’s TV and movie programming. Her not-for-profit www.SeeJane.org did the largest study ever done of G-rated movies and found that 3 out of 4 characters are male — even today! SeeJane is currently undertaking a study of TV shows and will be doing a study of PG-13 movies soon.
“It sprang out of watching preschool kids’ programs with my daughter and noticing how imbalanced the ratio of male to female characters is, still, on shows. The ratio seemed to be 3-to-1 or 4-to-1, and the female character — usually there was one — would be very stereotyped,” Davis says. “So I started to think, what is the message we’re still sending to kids? That boys’ stories are more interesting, more prevalent and significant, and that girls, if they are there at all, are peripheral and acting stereotypically girlie.”
“I think it would be hard to argue that kids are better off if characters in movies and TV shows they watch are predominantly male,” Davis says. “For boys to see girls taking up half the space on the planet is a really good thing. And for girls to see themselves taking up half the space is a good thing.“
Technorati Tags: Academy Award, actress, [tag]Geena Davis, Women’s Sports Foundation, Dads and Daughters
