Geena Davis runs her own Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. She started it after she starred in Thelma & Louise, because it was so groundbreaking at the time to have two female characters go on a crime spree and eschew men, and the reaction to that film stuck with Davis. She partnered with Moms First, a nonprofit activism group focused on making life/the economy/marriage better for American mothers. The Geena Davis Institute and Moms First partnered with Archewell, and Archewell funded a study about how motherhood is portrayed in television and streaming shows. Would you believe that TV moms are overwhelmingly white, young and thin, and married to men who are the breadwinners and they always live in clean homes? Shocking!
The Duchess of Sussex is teaming up with actor Geena Davis and Moms First, a longtime charity partner of the Archewell Foundation, to raise awareness about the ways television depicts characters who are mothers, backed up by data gathered from programming across 2022.
On Thursday, Moms First and the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media shared the results of a study that shows how those portrayals don’t always reflect reality, and argues that a change is necessary if we want to shift public attitudes and policy. The study, funded by the Archewell Foundation, found that though TV moms have become slightly more diverse, they are still underrepresented as earners and are still largely young, white, and thin. In 2022, when a couple with kids under 18 had a clear breadwinner, it was male 86.5% of the time. The study found that childcare and the realities of keeping a house running are largely erased.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Davis says she was surprised by how “dated” the various portrayals of TV moms seemed. “The representation of motherhood seemed like such a throwback,” she says. “It didn’t reflect modern reality anywhere near as closely as I had hoped or imagined.”
In a statement, Meghan explained her reasoning for signing onto the project. “My past experience as an actress, and now today as a producer and mother, have amplified my belief in the critical importance of supporting women and moms both behind the lens and in front of it,” she said. “This report about the portrayal of mothers in entertainment highlights the gaps we need to fill to achieve true representation in the content we create and consume, and I’m honored to support this work through the Archewell Foundation.”
Davis has been working on issues of women’s representation since she founded the institute in 2004, based on the idea that presenting producers and film executives with the numbers about gender disparity in media could lead to tangible change. “Images have a profound impact on people’s perceptions of themselves and others, and therefore the images can be used to create good,” she says. “I saw that children’s movies and TV made specifically for kids seemed to have a huge gender disparity…. What if we’re training kids from the beginning to have unconscious gender bias by showing boys as more important and taking up more space in the world?”
Davis mentioned that she hasn’t had the chance to catch the duchess’s role in Suits, but she is thankful for the support from the Archewell Foundation. “We love having her support and the support of Archwell,” Davis says. “We can’t do it without financial support like that, and it’s obviously a subject that’s very near and dear to her heart.”
Moms First’s Reshma Saujani thanked Meghan for the work she has done since the pandemic to support the charity and make issues like paid leave a central part of her platform. “She had a line she would say, and I always steal it from her: The most important title I have is mother,” Saujani says. “The one ask is to show our multidimensionality. Show us both as moms and workers, don’t just show one or the other. Show us as we are: both.”
This is sort of why the original Roseanne was so groundbreaking, they showed a working-class family with a dirty house, and a mother and father who both had to work low-paying jobs (and I think Dan and Roseanne both only had high school educations, right?). This is also why Modern Family was sort of groundbreaking for network television as well – showing a Latina mother/stepmother, a gay couple raising an adopted daughter, etc. While this study reveals just how antiquated the current landscape is as far as representing the huge scope of American families, I also think television has moved away from traditional family sitcoms and everything is just very glossy, everyone is rich and everyone has a nice, clean house.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.