Panel: 'Family' films not friendly to women

PARK CITY — The only people who need to care about Jennifer Siebel Newsom's Sundance documentary, "Miss Representation," are women and the men who care about wives, mothers, daughters, sisters and female friends. Everybody else can stop reading.

The film explores the messages females receive from television, movies, news organizations and digital media and how it informs males and females about who they are and what they can and can't become. The film's tagline sums it up: You can't be what you can't see.

Media in the film isn't pretty, but it is pretty clear as it presents a strong indictment with data and shaming examples of what many of us see but fail to really notice. It is also headed to 20,000 school children of an appropriate age this year in an effort to educate high school students about the media.

After its world premiere Saturday, the director and media power brokers — actress Geena Davis; Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media; journalist, author and activist Gloria Stienem; groundbreaking journalist Pat Mitchell; and author Barbara Berg — gathered at a media panel to further spread the word through a packed room of journalists. The director mostly let her film speak for itself and let her guests take most of the time.

They had a warning with their message: Many people are not going to listen.

"If you talk about women's issues, it can't be serious," said Steinem. "Women in the media? It's really not serious."

But the data, the numbers, are shocking.

Davis credits some of the strong women she has portrayed on film with helping her examine carefully what messages were reaching her own daughter in the form of "G" rated entertainment. She formed a foundation to study "family friendly" media and found that in "G," "PG," and "PG-13," films in the last 20 years, men outnumbered women three to one. And almost always, the females were merely background characters.

Davis said in "G" movies it's "Where the girls aren't."

Even in crowd shots with extras, statistics say that women are far less common than men. Central females are almost exclusively shown pursing a romantic connection and the most common female occupation shown to children is — wait for it — royalty.