Representation of Women in film

As our protagonist is a teenage girl, we thought it was important to research how women are currently represented in film and why.

Polygraph conducted a study across over 1000 films in which they found that after age 31, the percentage of dialogue a woman received began to drop, at age 42 it fell significantly, and at age 65 it was nearly non-existent. In addition to this, only 18% of films have women as two of the top three speakers. Even in films in which the main character is a woman, such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens, 78% of the dialogue is spoken by male characters. However, this could be explained by 80% of films in 2014 having no credited female writers, meaning that mostly men are deciding who gets which lines.
The Male Gaze, an idea proposed by Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist, suggests that in film, women are presented, through a masculine view, as an object of male pleasure. It consists of the perspectives of the person behind the camera, the characters within the film, and the viewer. The camera puts the viewer into the perspective of a straight man, and shows the woman objectively to the characters and the audience. Over time, this representation has come to be seen as 'normal' merely because it is the dominant ideology, and therefore much more common that an opposite view. In our opening, we did not want to show our main character as an inferior character to the males alongside her as we are using themes of domestic abuse and mental illness, and so we want the focus to be on the difficulty she faces due to these, rather than her position in the social hierarchy because of her gender.
Women are also stereotypically represented in particular roles in film. A few examples of these are:
The Heartless Boss-Miranda Priestly, The Devil Wears Prada (2006), who is shown as the main antagonist for the male protagonist.
Damsel in Distress- Rachel Dawes, The Dark Night (2008), who despite being a lawyer and a powerful female character, still needs saving by the male protagonist, Batman himself.
Transforming-Sandy, Grease(1978), after meeting a romantic interest, she completely changes her appearance and personality in order to become the person she thinks he will like
Desperate-Gigi Phillips, He's Just Not That Into You (2009), who repeatedly misreads her dates as being misleading, and thus is always waiting from a phone call from a man that is never going to come.