Hollywood Sucks at Diversity, New Study Confirms

At this point, we all know #OscarsSoWhite, but by the looks of a new report on diversity, the problems go a lot deeper than just the Academy Award nominations.

Television and film have serious issues with diversity, the report obtained by Variety confirms. The searing study (which comes from the Media, Diversity and Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism) looked at 109 films and 306 TV shows spanning across broadcast, cable and streaming and found that only a third of speaking characters were female. Only 30% of speaking characters were from minority groups and just 2% were LGBT (something GLAAD’s been all over). Of all those movies and shows, half of them featured zero Asian characters and 20 percent had no black ones.

The problem extends to behind the camera, as well. Only 17.1% of broadcast directors were female, but that was still better than 15.1% of cable directors and 11.8% of streaming directors, which was also well above 3.4% of film directors. Racial minorities didn’t fare any better, having directed 9.6% of broadcast programs, 16.8% of cable series, 11.4% of streaming shows and 12.7% of films.

Head over to Variety for more dire details from the report.