People in power don’t have faith in women. We’ve been saying this for a long time — and data backs us up. New research from Slated paints a strikingly similar picture to the one we’ve seen many times: there are dramatic gender fault lines in Hollywood, pointing to what Slated describes as a “systemic lack of trust on the part of the film industry when it comes to collaborating with women in the workplace.” While this doesn’t exactly register as news, these findings are valuable and offer even more damning evidence about sexism in the industry. We need to keep repeating facts and figures like these, and drawing attention to these unacceptable numbers.

Slated’s comprehensive study considered 1,591 feature films released theatrically on at least one screen in the U.S. between 2010–2015.

The gender bias, writes Slated, “is expressed not just in the lower production budgets that women routinely operate from but, even more crucially, in the number of movie screens on which films by women directors are shown.” Male-directed films with a budget under $25 million are shown on three times as many screens as women-directed films in that budget range, 646 screens for men compared to 242 for women. As Slated rightly concludes, “This imbalance has a direct, adverse effect on those films’ performance — as well as industry perception of female above-the-line talent.”

This data analysis “quantifies in glaring numbers the extent to which women in all key filmmaking roles are both underutilized and undervalued by the film industry.” Slated observes, “The often superior investment returns that women professionals on both sides of the camera generate in the marketplace, as compared with their male counterparts, is simply not matched by the opportunities and resources that they are able to command.”

Movies about women make money because people are hungry for these stories. We are not a niche market: we are the majority of the U.S. population. We get shafted up and down the food chain with no investment in our stories and no investment in our talent. It is a never-ending circle. If you have a big-budget movie, you have to be on a certain number of screens, and then in order to get people into those thousands of screens, you have to spend serious money on marketing.

So if you don’t get the budget, you don’t get the screens, and you don’t get the marketing then no one sees your movie. It’s simple.

In general, films centered on women require smaller budgets because these are usually stories with dialogue and the narrative is not about blowing shit up, having aliens land on the planet, or having a superhero save the world. While we’d be happy to see women take on more big-budget and action-oriented films, we all know that there are very few opportunities for women to helm and star in these kinds of movies.

But let’s remember that movies by and about men that don’t fall into the tent-pole categories still get higher budgets and still get seen more often. Because stories about men are valued differently than stories about women.

Here are more of Slated’s findings:

• Women directors are the most under-represented major category in cinema, accounting for 8.8% of films made in this survey period. They are followed by women writers (13.2%), women producers (19.8%) and women acting leads (29.4%).
• Regardless of role, women are afforded smaller budgets than their male counterparts.
• Scripts from women writers achieve the highest ROI of any category but they receive two-thirds of the average budgets given to male writers. For films budgeted at more than $25 million, women writers achieve an industry-high ROI of 3.72 yet account for just 8.7% of theatrically released screenplays.
• In every cinematic genre, far fewer films are directed by women than by men.

They’ve also created helpful infographics to drive their points home:

Check out more infographics and analysis over at Slated.