We spend every day at Women and Hollywood educating, advocating, and agitating for gender equality in Hollywood and the global film industry. We know that while there has been a lot of talk about sexism and discrimination (including from us) that really and truly we haven’t seen the numbers shift in any significant way towards achieving gender equality. We understand that shifts of this kind take time. Inequality has been the norm for decades. It’s entrenched in every facet of the industry. That’s not going to change overnight, and it’s unrealistic to expect it will.

We have seen some positive progress, particularly outside the U.S. where women across the world are pushing for equal access to available funding. But funding of this kind is not available in the U.S. and the budgets of Hollywood films are often very high, which makes it harder for women to break in. We have noticed that there are some women getting jobs to direct, but the budgets for those films are dramatically lower than the budgets the men get.

Since there are so many different conversations and programs to attempt to alter this entrenched sexism (and please don’t stop having these conversations and funding these programs!) it is vital that we assess the progress of all of our work. (Note: This year we asked all the women directors responding to our TIFF interview questions about this issue. Please check out what women directors from around the world have to say about the opportunities — and lack thereof — available to female filmmakers.)

Here’s new data from the Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative that proves that we all need to keep on keeping on. We may have convinced people that there is a problem, but solving it will take a while. So buckle up — we are in this for the long haul:

MDSC Initiative at USC Annenberg, led by Dr. Stacy Smith, studied 800 of the top grossing films from 2007–2015 (excluding 2011) analyzing 35,205 characters for gender, race/ethnicity, LGBT status and — for the first time — the presence of disability.

Here are some highlights of the findings:

Hollywood is so, so male, white, and straight:

Of the 4,370 named, speaking characters from the top-grossing films in 2015:

• 31.4 percent were women — a figure that’s remained consistent since 2007. (In reality, women account for 50.8 percent of the population in the U.S)
• 26.3 percent were underrepresented racial/ethnic groups.
• Less than one percent were LGBT-identified.
• Less than 2.4 percent were disabled roles, and only 19 percent of those were women.
• Only 18 percent of the movies had a gender balanced cast.
• 49 films included no speaking or named Asian or Asian-American characters (nearly half!); 17 featured no Black/African American characters; 45 films did not include a character with a disability; 82 did not feature a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender character.

Women directors are still at a great disadvantage — but especially women of color.

Out of the 800 top grossing films from 2007–2015 (excluding 2011):

• There were only 29 unique women: Female directors totaled 4.1 percent.

• Only three Black or African-American women, and one Asian woman, have directed one of the top 100 films from 2007–2015. 5.5 percent of the 886 directors examined were Black or African American and 2.8 percent were Asian or Asian American.

In 2015, 107 directors helmed the top-grossing 100 movies (some were co-directed), among them, only eight women (7.5 percent) — and all were white. That means there were 12.4 men to every woman.

Directing isn’t the only field in the industry that’s dominated by men.

A total of 1,365 directors, writers, and producers worked behind the scenes on the 100 top-grossing films of 2015.

• 11.8 percent of writers were women
• 22 percent of producers were women
• 114 composers worked on those 100 movies. Only one of them was a woman.

If you’re over 45 years old and want to book acting jobs, you better be a man.

• Only five of the films with female leads of co-leads in 2015 were over 45, while 26 movies in 2015 featured leads or co leads with males 45 years of age or older.

Women and girls are still being sexualized.

• “Females were over three times as likely as their male counterparts to be shown in sexually revealing clothing (30.2 percent vs. 7.7 percent) and with some nudity (29 percent vs. 9.5 percent). Girls/women (12 percent) were also more likely than boys/men (3.6 percent) to be referred to as physically attractive.”

When you have women directors or writers, there are more women onscreen.

• The top-grossing films of 2015 “with at least one female at the helm portrayed a higher percentage of female characters on screen (41 percent) than those with only males at the helm (30.5 percent). A similar but less pronounced increase was observed by screenwriter gender. Movies with a female screenwriter attached featured more girls/women on screen (36.9 percent) than did those movies with only male screenwriters attached (29.2 percent).”

The future isn’t totally bleak.

There was an 11 percent increase in female lead or co-lead characters from 2014 to 2015. This seems to suggest that Hollywood is starting to get the message that women leads pay off at the box office.

That being said…

As Dr. Smith writes, “Hollywood is an epicenter of cultural inequality” and “the problems are pervasive and systemic.”

To check out the full study click here.