The historical sexism of Disney

Who doesn’t know Disney? This film company released 56 films since its first, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1937. Disney has had a prominent impact on hundreds of millions of people, adults and children. Their immense success comes from interesting storylines, re-making classic tales, and effective marketing strategies. In 2016, Disney earned 22.45 billion dollars in media revenue, making it the second largest media company in the world after Alphabet, the owner of Google. In 2018, Disney was the most profitable Hollywood film studio, for the fourth year in a row. They must be doing something right! Sadly, however, like the overwhelming majority of film companies, Disney’s library of films is sexist for the most part, despite its recent dramatic improvements.

Given that it can be a controversial topic, is it possible to objectively determine if a film is sexist or not? A tool that we can use to evaluate the portrayal of women in fiction is the Bechdel test. It was invented by Alison Bechdel, a cartoonist. She wrote a comic strip in 1985 titled “The Rule”, where a woman is talking to another, saying that she only watched films that met a certain set of criteria:

1) If the movie features at least two named women

2) If they speak to each other

3) If they talk to each other about something other than men.

People have since adopted this technique to analyse films and it’s quite popular to loosely measure how women are depicted in them. It should be very easy for a film to meet these three simple rules, right? However, only approximately 45% out of a total of 41 Disney films passed the Bechdel test, 9 of those only passing... dubiously. This is lower than the worldwide average of 57.7% which is already not very encouraging. Amongst the films that didn’t pass the test is the famous The Lion King.

In another recent study, this time analysing how many words were spoken by different characters in 30 Disney and Pixar films, 73.3% of them had a majority of male dialogue. In addition, only 22% of films feature female characters who speak more than males. Also, in terms of the amount of dialogue, the majority (82%) of films have male characters in two thirds of the top three leading dialogue-rich roles. For female characters, this occurs in 18% of films.

Going beyond both the Bechdel test and dialogue analyses, it is interesting to examine how women are physically portrayed in Disney productions: They tend to act in a stereotypically feminine manner, generally sport prominent eyelashes (even on non-human characters!), be caucasian, and unnaturally thin.

Disney is not the most sexist media company, nor the least, but it has a bigger impact than most due to its popularity and size. Generations of children grew up watching the company’s movies and series. As stated previously, the company has made significant improvements in their latest films, but some older Disney productions are still very much advertised by Disney, such as Disney princesses, which are sexist for the most part, promoting toxic ideals. Even so, Disney still prominently advertises these princesses through spin-offs and merchandise for the sole sake of money gain. Perhaps the company should take responsibility for influencing sex perceptions (as well as unrealistic body types, and love) in today’s world and consider the role their movies play in further anchoring sex stereotypes and inequalities deeper into our society.