In her talk for TEDWomen 2016, Dr. Stacy L. Smith emphasizes how movies are much more than entertainment. “We can also be transported through storytelling [in film],” she observes. “Storytelling is so important. Stories tell us what societies value, they offer us lessons, and they share and preserve our history. Stories are amazing.”

This TED Talk, now available to watch online, focuses particularly on how stories portray women. Smith, the founding director of USC Annenberg’s Media, Diversity, & Social Change (MDSC) Initiative, uses her platform to discuss what she calls “the epidemic of invisibility.”

At the time of this talk, Smith and her team had studied 800 movies from 2007–2015, “cataloguing every speaking character on-screen for gender, race, ethnicity, LGBT, and characters with a disability.” In order to be “counted” a character has to say only one word. “This is a very low bar,” Smith acknowledges.

Here are a few highlights of their “really depressing” data:

• Less than a third of all roles go to girls and women
• The women that are visible are overwhelmingly white, heterosexual, and able-bodied
• Women are only the lead or co-lead about a third of the time
• Females are about three times as likely to be sexualized in film than their male counterparts

As Smith concludes, these findings show how women are systematically “erased and marginalized in a lot of our stories.”

Throughout the 15-minute speech, Smith takes her audience through the factors that created this environment for women in film and presents viable solutions to alleviate women’s invisibility onscreen. She also identifies one incredibly effective solution: “Hire female directors.”

“Turns out, the female directors are associated with, in terms of short films and indie films, more girls and women on-screen, more stories with women in the center, more stories with women 40 years of age or older on-screen… More underrepresented characters in terms of race and ethnicity, and most importantly, more women working behind the camera in key production roles,” she summarizes.

Concluding her talk with a call to action, Smith tells the audience that they (and we) can change things today: “Let’s agree to take action today to eradicate the epidemic of invisibility.” She continues, “Let’s agree to take action today, to agree that U.S. audiences and global viewers demand and deserve more. And let’s agree today that the next generation of viewers and audiences, that they deserve to see the stories we were never able to see.”

Throughout her career, Smith has written more than 100 journal articles, book chapters, and reports on content patterns and effects of the media, especially in terms of gender, race, LGBT status, disability, and age. One of her most recent studies with the MDSC, “Inclusion in the Director’s Chair?,” found that there has been little to no change in the number of women directors in the past decade.

You can check out Smith’s TED Talk below. To find out more about Smith’s research, go to the MDSC website.