Hollywood actress Geena Davis has received an honorary award for supporting gender equality and speaking up against bias in the movie industry.
The actress spoke to an audience of hundreds of Hollywood power players at the Governors Awards, an annual black-tie event hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the group that hands out the Oscars.
While equality for women lags throughout U.S. society, it is even worse in film and television, said Davis, the “Thelma and Louise” star who founded a nonprofit research group called the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2004.
“However abysmal the numbers are in real life, it’s far worse in fiction where you make it up!” said Davis as she accepted the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
The actress spoke to an audience of hundreds of Hollywood power players at the Governors Awards, an annual black-tie event hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the group that hands out the Oscars.
Davis, who won a supporting actress Oscar in 1989 for “The Accidental Tourist,” said gender inequality on-screen “can be fixed absolutely overnight.”
She urged everyone in the audience to take the scripts they were currently working on and “cross out a bunch of first names of ensemble characters and supporting characters, and make them female.”
“With one stroke, you have created some non-stereotyped characters that might turn out to be even more interesting now that they have a gender swap.
“Let’s make this change happen,” she added.