Extract from Why Men Win At Work by Gill Whitty-Collins

why men win at work
those stories being dominated by a male subject. 23 One in five
solo presenters on uk radio is female (only one in eight during
peak time). Women make up only 24% of people heard, read
about or seen in newspapers, television and radio news. A
pathetic 5% of sports media coverage in the uk is devoted
to women’s sport and comedy shows such as Mock the Week
have been criticised for ‘gender tokenism’ with their maledominated
panels. 24
It’s the same story in film: women make up only 21% of
all film-makers, and in the 92 year history of the Oscars, only
five women have been nominated for the Best Director Award
(only one has ever won it, Kathryn Bigelow) and only 14% of
all nominations have gone to women. 25 A woman has never
won the Best Picture Award and Jane Campion is the only
woman to have won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or in
its 72-year history. Perhaps it is not surprising then that male
actors spend 100% more time on screen in films than females
do, they also have 69% of the speaking roles, with only 23%
of films featuring a female protagonist.
Research from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in
Media found that, from 2006 to 2009, not one female
character was depicted in g-rated family films in the field
of medical science, as a business leader, in law, or politics 26
and that in the top 100 us family films of 2019, male leads
outnumber female leads two to one. 27 They saw the same issue
in advertising: based on their analysis of over 2.7 million
YouTube ads from 2015 to 2019, they saw female characters
44% of the time but only 29% of the time in a business and
industrial context, with men having 50% more speaking
time and more likely to be shown working and in leadership
positions. 28
Female characters, meanwhile, are significantly more likely
to wear revealing clothing and to be shown in the kitchen,
shopping or cleaning. Perhaps this is not entirely surprising when
we learn that, globally, 89% of creative directors are men. 29
When we watch a film or tv show with our ‘gender glasses’
24