Two long-running studies recently published revealed that the big screen is the one place where gender parity grew in the year 2024. Conducted at San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, and at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, for the first time in the history of both studies, top-grossing films with female leads were at least as common as top-grossing films with male leads.
The USC study found that, across the top 100 movies at the North American box office in 2024, 54 featured a story that centered a female lead. These films include Pixar’s Inside Out 2, led by Amy Poehler; Disney’s Moana 2 with Auli’i Cravalho; Universal’s Wicked led by Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo; and Paramount’s A Quiet Place: Day One to name a few. The number is considerably higher than 2023, when 30% of movies had a female lead and more than double what it was when the researchers first started tracking the issue in 2007.
“We’re seeing a real shift in sensibility,” says Stacy L. Smith, founder of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. “This is the first time we can say that gender equality has been reached in top-grossing films.”
This news comes at a time when the Trump administration is increasing rollbacks of diversity and inclusion programs, which studios has been growing and promoting during the years both studies were founded. How studios will respond to President Trump’s executive order targeting cutting DEI programs among private companies is still unclear. However, PBS closed its DEI office this week and Disney has rolled back some of its DEI policies.
“We have to have those programs in place because the art and the storytelling of an entire group of people is often ignored, overlooked, or not compensated in the way that they should be,” Smith said, of the role of DEI programs in Hollywood.
Universal released the most female-led films in 2024, under chairwoman Donna Langley with 10 movies, or 66.7% of its slate female led. Warner Bros. followed with 55.6%, Lionsgate with 54.5%, Paramount with 44.4%, Disney with 40% and Sony with 38.5%.
The USC study also found that just 25 of the top 100 films featured a lead from an underrepresented racial/ethnic group, a large decrease from 2023. Additionally, just eight films featured a woman 45 years or older in a lead role compared to 21 films depicted a man in the same age bracket.
