Women In Adventure Films
20th Dec 2011
In the light of criticisms levelled at the BBC for the fact that there are no women on the shortlist of the Sports Personality Of The Year this year I thought I’d take a look at the films submitted to ShAFF for 2012 to see how well women are represented. Of the 200+ films there are 127 that could reasonably be examined (others I either haven’t yet seen, or they are animations, time lapses or have other non-people based subject matter). Of those 127, 11 are actually about women, 18 are about couples or mixed sex teams, and the rest (98!) appear to feature either no women at all or perhaps a token giggling onlooker as some guy does something ‘extreme’. In fairness in quite a few of the 98 you rarely get to see the people behind the helmets, but the credit lists and captions very, very rarely feature women. Pretty damning stuff. I’m not going to start hypothesising why this is, suffice to say that it is a frustrating state of affairs. Exit surveys at ShAFF 2011 showed that the male / female split in the audience was roughly 65% to 35%. We’re definitely interested in addressing this so please drop us a line if you have ideas / comments on what we can do to rectify things.
