A study has concluded that Hollywood “still functions as a straight, white, boys’ club.” The report comes out of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Damning statistics allege that only 3.4 percent of 109 films released by major studios in 2014 were directed by women, and only two of those women were black. About 87 percent of directors across 414 films and television shows were white. About half of those films didn’t even include a single Asian or Asian-American character. One-fifth of those films failed to include any black characters at all. Released just days before the 2016 Oscars, the study alleges that women, members of the LGBT community, as well as people from ethnic minority backgrounds, are experiencing an ”epidemic of invisibility” in the industry. The findings should come as no surprise to those familiar with the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, which protests the lack of diversity in Oscar nominations this year and in the year prior. The study’s co-author, Stacy L. Smith, said, “We have an inclusion crisis... It doesn’t match the norms of the population of the United States.”
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