UN report on films: Indian movies show more working women than France, US

It's the first international study of gender images in films from all over the world. Presented by The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, UN Women and The Rockefeller Foundation, this report looked at films released between January 2010 and May 2013 and analysed how women were being treated on and off screen in show business.

The countries covered in this study are the 10 most profitable territories according to the Motion Pictures Association of America and the researchers also included popular films made by the local film industries. The countries covered in the report are Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and United Kingdom. In total, 120 films were examined. Every speaking part or named character was taken into consideration.

The numbers don't look too good: only 23.5 percent had a girl or woman in the lead role. Of 5,799 speaking or named characters, 69.1 percent are male.

Those, however, are general findings. Here's what the UN report tells us about India and its on screen women.

(Keep in mind that the study looked at only "10 domestically popular films". Whether these 10 are taken from Hindi cinema or include regional is not clear, though the chances of them being Bollywood titles are very high since box office collection is the only consideration. As the researchers make quite clear, this report is not comprehensive, but it does show trends in the industry.)

1. Women are not on top.

Who'd have thunk? We have something in common with France! Just like our actresses don't get to play leads in films, neither do theirs. The percentage of domestically popular films with a woman in the lead in France and India was a big fat zero, according to the report.

In Mardaani, Rani Mukerji plays a copy. Image courtesy: Facebook.

Going through the top grossing Bollywood titles from the period covered in the study, we've got to say the study is a little harsh. In 2010, we saw Band Baaja Baaraat, which may have had a hero but the story was driven by the female lead. The Dirty Picture came out in 2011 and its star was definitely a woman. Two films out of 40 hit films isn't very heartening, but it is marginally better than zero.

In sharp contrast, Chinese, Korean and Japanese films offer far more opportunities to women and their audiences are clearly more accepting of the idea of an actress in the leading role. As many as 50 percent of the Korean hits had female leads (Japan and China: 40 percent.

Predictably, when there are more women writers and directors, the kind of roles written for actresses improves significantly. At present, for every woman working behind the scenes, there are 6.2 men. Within the sample that the report studied, only 9.1 percent of the directors and 12.1 percent of the writers in Indian films are women.

2. Our films, more than anyone else's, judge female roles by appearance

One of the areas the UN report is interested in is the sexualisation of female characters. Incidentally, if you want to ogle at women, it seems German films are your best bet. As much as 39 percent of women characters in German films will have an actress partially nude and/or have her show up in sexy clothes. In spite of the outlandish outfits our heroines wear in Indian films, we're a little lower than Germany as far as sexy attire (34.1 percent) and nudity (35 percent) are concerned. The silver lining is that Indian audiences are clearly not as prudish as many would like to believe since these are popular films that are under consideration.

Interestingly, we've got the highest score for "attractiveness", which doesn't mean Indian heroines are the prettiest. Attractiveness refers to "verbal/non-verbal utterances that communicate the physical desirousness of another character". Basically, characters in films judge women mostly on physical and sexual terms, which in turn encourages viewers to do the same in the real world. This is not a good thing. Ideally, you'd want a character to be distinctive for what they do or the kind of person they are, rather than their attractiveness.

3. When it comes to working women, real and reel aren't at odds

Finally, here's something that makes us look pretty good. India is the only country in which film jobs for female characters revealed only a small difference from real world statistics. The percentage of women in the Indian workforce is 25.3 percent (as per World Bank figures) and in the sample of films that the report covered, 15.6 percent of the female roles showed the characters as working professionals. That's the lowest differential of all the 10 countries. It seems our films are cheering for working women, although it's another matter whether the on-screen jobs are in any way representative of the reality of working in those industries.

The worst offender in this regard was France, where 47.4 percent of the real workforce is women but only 18.8 percent of the female characters are working women in films.