From Jezebel: Actress Geena Davis takes on gender imbalance in children’s entertainment:
Six years ago, Geena Davis starting watching children’s TV and videos with her then two-year-old daughter. Davis thought she’d find cute, educational fare; instead she found a disturbing gender imbalance.
“It jumped out at me,” Davis tells the Sydney Morning Herald:
There was this huge gender gap. It’s partly because I had been in some movies that had resonated with women, so I’d had this heightened awareness of the paucity of parts for female actors. The stuff that we make for us. But I really didn’t know that it was like this for kids.
You just expect Sesame Street took care of everything and now it’s all educational. So I thought, ‘You know what? I would like to know the facts.’
Something I think about when I watch Sid the Science Kid….. Would the program have been worse if it had been Sally the Science Kid?
Something I think about when I watch Sid the Science Kid….. Would the program have been worse if it had been Sally the Science Kid? Of course it would have been just as good, so I don’t know why PBS put a boy as the lead in a show about science.
At the very least, they could have done a brother and sister combination, like Sid and Sally, the Science Kids, if they were “worried” about excluding boys. (lol)
Anecdotally, Davis is in a oft-overlooked film called Cutthroat Island (1995) in which she plays the main character and the co-star, Mathew Modine, is decidedly in the “female” role of being rescued. There’s also great chemistry between them and Davis – who is beautiful and vibrant – isn’t “made up” to look pretty and feminine. She’s just a kick-ass woman pirate.
I’m not saying it’s a great film, but it is a great departure from a lot of action-adventure where ladies are sexualized, marginalized, and rescued. I always have loved action-adventure so the film is a good one for me and for my daughter.