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Team members: Juliana Bolivar, Youngryun Cho, Jamie Choi
📽 Research
💡 Ideation
🔨 Process
✅ Outcome
👩🏻💻 Reflection
Through desk research, we learned that there’s a phenomenon called search fatigue when it comes to users searching for something to watch. These statistics made us wonder if we can develop a new search platform for movies, something that can effectively tackle this issue.
When trying to ideate what could make our service more unique than just searching on Netflix, IMDB, or JustWatch, we considered how we could help amplify representation in the media. According to Women and Hollywood, in 2021’s top films, women made up only 34% of all speaking roles. Additionally, nearly 60% of these characters were white women. Black women are the second most represented at 19.3% of female speaking characters. Then, Latinas at 9.5%, Asian women at 8.4%, Indigenous women at 0.3%, MENA (Middle Eastern and North African) women at 0.5%; and Mixed-race women, 1.4%. The report, It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World, notes that if Latino- and Asian-centered movies like Encanto, In the Heights, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Minari are excluded from the analysis, then share of Latinas and Asian women as major characters fall to 5.3% and 6.7%, respectively. Despite the public advocacy for more women of color on screen, and women’s empowerment movements like #MeToo — which heavily involved people in the film industry — representation for women in film has been at a plateau.
It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World also analyzed character portrayals, finding that women featured onscreen tended to be younger than men. Their character goals tended to revolve around personal life and their relationship status, while male characters were more likely to have work-related goals and an identifiable occupation.
Behind the camera, the number of top-grossing movies by female directors declined in from 16% to 12% 2021, according to Celluloid Ceiling Report from San Diego State University. Only 7 women (or 2.2% of all nominees in history) have ever been nominated for Best Director, with the first winner, Katheryn Bigelow, in 2010. In 2021, Chloé Zhao became the second female director to win for Nomadland.
Our team was shocked to learn that female representation in media is still so low, and as women of color, we all felt passionately about amplifying WOC’s voices.
