This is a post I want to write, but having promised myself I will do my best not to get too angry in this blog, I’ve decided to keep the words to a minimum, and let the figures do the talking. As Lord Kelvin said, “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers pie charts you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers pie charts, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind” (I’m hungry, and the pie chart is the most culinary of the charts).
So… having zipped my lip… here are some statistics.
First let’s look at the gender division of the UK, using the 2011 Census from the Office for National Statistics. It’s pretty evenly divided.
Now, let’s have a little look at the gender division of people in the UK studying Drama in both Higher and Further Education. Enjoy that dominant Orange, Ladies… you won’t be seeing a lot more of it….
OK, right…. now let’s have a little look at some results from the survey of actors I carried out.
The question was, “Do You Create your Own Work?” The responses were as follows:
If you can read that horrible font/colour combination, you’ll be able to see that only 13% of the female actors who replied to the survey have no intention of making their own work, versus 32% of the male actors. Why is this? Are women just more proactive and motivated? No, of course we’re not. Sure, some of us are, but also … some of us just want to work, and there isn’t enough of it around – particularly if you’re a woman… or is there?
Having heard, on a number of occasions, over the last few years: “Everything on TV these days is about women. It’s getting boring”, I decided to have a little rummage around IMDB to see whether this was true, or whether I was just seeing things from my own, biased perspective.
Now…. before I go any further… I focussed mainly on “TV shows with strong female leads”, because these are the ones that I’ve heard described as “female heavy”, but I threw in a couple of others, for variety. It’s mainly crime stuff, because I love that shit. I’m not sure why I stuck Downton in there… just to lower the body count, probably.
I looked at two different sets of information. The first was looking at the gender balance of actors who had been in more than one episode of the series (at the time of writing this post, and according to IMDB) … Disclaimer: these shows have different numbers of episodes, and different formats, so it’s not hugely scientific, but hey-ho, I’m not trying to get a PhD in the subject, I’m justifying to make a point.
Here you go. Colour coding is the same as above… blue for boys and orange for girls, I don’t do pink. Also, it wasn’t an option.
Yes…. there is more Blue, but actually, apart from Vera, it’s more evenly distributed that I thought it would be… So then I decided to compare the gender balance of actors who had been in more than ten episodes of the series – the main protagonists of the shows… and this happened….
….. And that’s when I started trashing stuff….
No. Not really. What I actually did was decided to stop writing this blog post, and get back to my real writing… which, Ladies, I suggest is what you do too, because these stats don’t look too good… particularly when you consider that this is what the chart looks like for gender distributing of people training for, and presumably entering, the profession:
….
……..
Are you still here?
Why?
Oh. I’d promised a joke per post, hadn’t I? Here you go:
Why did the chicken cross the road?
Because there were a fuck load of chickens and not enough clucking jobs on the side she started on.
This post was originally published as ‘The Anxious Actor”
My Name is Not Debbie 