Less than 1% of characters in Hollywood movies are LGBT, study finds

A brand new study by the University of Southern California sampled 100 top-grossing Hollywood movies from 2015 and has found that most of the films have remained mostly about white, straight males.

The study was conducted by the Media, Diversity and Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and was released on Wednesday (September 7).

It proves how little has improved in terms of media representation for ethnic minorities, women and LGBT people.

The study’s lead author and professor at USC Stacy L. Smith said that “We’re seeing entrenched inequality.”

“Whether we’re studying gender, race, ethnicity, LGBT or characters with disabilities, we’re really seeing exclusionary force leaving out anybody that’s not a straight, white, able-bodied man. Despite all the chatter and all the activism and all the press attention, it’s another year where the status quo has been maintained.”

According to the Associated Press, the study reveals that out of the 100 sampled films, LGBT characters only accounted for less than 1% of all named or speaking characters and only 32 characters out of 4,370 were LGBT.

Despite this, researchers found that there was more racial and ethnic diversity across LGBT character with 40% of them coming from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group.

With race, around 73.3% of characters were white while 12.2% were black, 5.3% Latino and 3.9% Asian.

You can check out the full findings at the Associated Press.

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