Gender gaps don’t just plague the film industry, but the field of film criticism too. As we reported earlier this year, the numbers are pretty dire:
The study took a look at the 2,000 reviews written by “top critics” in the spring of 2013 that were aggregated on rotten tomatoes. The be considered a top critic a writer need to: “be published at a print publication in the top 10% of circulation, employed as a film critic at a national broadcast outlet for no less than five years, or employed as a film critic for an editorial-based website with over 1.5 million monthly unique visitors for a minimum of three years.”
Women make up only 22% of those critics and wrote only 18% of the reviews.
To draw attention to that gender imbalance and allow women critics a few more virtual column inches, Chaz Ebert announced a new initiative at RogerEbert.com today:
What if we had a week of articles and reviews by women? That’s the experiment I want to try this week at Rogerebert.com. This is something that Roger was also interested in doing, that we discussed several times, particularly when we could see a difference in our own thoughts about a movie, and we could pinpoint it to gender. Men and women are just raised differently in our society and so it shouldn’t be a surprise that we may think differently.
Two thumbs up, RogerEbert.com! We’ll be checking into the site a few extra times this week.
