The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative is calling out Hollywood after a forensic analysis said just one-third of speaking roles went to women in 2025’s top films.
The study’s author, Dr. Stacy L. Smith, looked at Hollywood’s top films between 2017 and 2025 and found that speaking roles in the film industry’s top films are consistently at around one-third for women. In 2023, for instance, Smith calculated that 31.7 percent of speaking roles went to female characters. That number rose a bot for 2024 to 33.6 percent. And the highest year was the 34.6 percent seen in 2022, The Wrap reported.
“Nineteen years of data show that change is possible, but they also show how fragile that progress can be,” Smith said on her preface. “This is not the first time this report has shown that meaningful gains are followed by a return to business as usual. At a moment when the industry is redefining its future, inclusion can be part of the solution, not a casualty of contraction. The question is no longer whether the industry can change. It’s whether it will.”
The most speaking roles for women were in comedies, with 38.7 percent. In animated films, women made up only 28.6 percent of speaking roles. In action films it was 30.4 percent, Smith added.
“While we’ve seen pockets of progress for women on screen, the pace of change has been slow. Year after year, many of the same patterns remain,” Smith said. “Incremental improvement is important for achieving meaningful transformation, but after nearly 2 decades of research and advocacy from many groups, it is clear that the industry is content to wait for change to find them rather than pursuing solutions.”
Female directors, producers, and writers were also at low numbers, Smith reported.
Female directors have made up an average 7 percent of directors since 2007. Also since 2007, the number of female composers went from 0 percent to 8.5 percent by 2025. And women writers and producers rose to 16 percent and 24.4 percent respectively last year.
Smith also claimed that the number of racial, ethnic, or underrepresented characters reached “proportional representation” in 2025 with 41.5 percent of speaking and named characters. Along with that, the number of white characters fell by 19.1 percent. Also, characters with some sort of disability stayed constant at 2.8 percent.
“Still, 30 movies did not have any Black characters, 46 were missing Hispanic/Latino characters, and 26 did not have any Asian characters,” The Wrap added.
LGBTQ+ roles did not grow, remaining “flat” at 1 percent, and there wasn’t a single transgender character at all, Smith noted.
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