It's 2021 and International Women's Day is still a thing - we need to continue to challenge

Men speak most in best picture winning films

I came across an infographic which was doing the rounds in the lead up to the Oscars a couple of years ago, titled Men speak most in best picture winning films. It is true. To a preposterous level.

Men speak significantly more, not only in Best Picture winning films, but in mainstream English-language films in general. Hannah Anderson and Matt Daniels went to a great deal of effort to help us see this (very clearly) for ourselves by building this useful interactive data visualisation, where they looked at 2,000 movies and categorised them according to the age and gender of the people who delivered dialogue.

Whether they are on screen or in books, heroes play a significant role in the tapestry of a child's life. As a teacher, I taught at schools in highly diverse urban settings, like Wood Green in London (where I blended in, as somebody who was born and raised in the city) and, in more rural settings, like Amersham, Bucks (where I was the first "foreigner" some of my students had met). I consciously put a lot of time and effort into considering and planning which heroes I presented to my students. Heroes that they could relate to, at times, and, often, heroes that would challenge their perceptions.

This is a topic that I touched on during my workshop at the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Educators Network (BAMEed) conference earlier this year. In the lead up to the workshop, I started making a collage of the faces of the lead actors from each of the top 10 UK box office hits over the last decade (2009-2018). I wanted to illustrate what our heroes look like in one image (100 headshots).

100 headshots

79 men. 21 women. 6 people of colour among the whole group. 0 women of colour. Our on-screen heroes do not reflect the societies we live in.

But is the onus on us, as educators, to project a more representative and relevant view of society and the world? A growing movement of teachers in America believe it is. Tens of thousands of US teachers have engaged in CPD to become better at Culturally Responsive Education (aka Culturally Relevant Education), which I recommend checking out. The idea is to support students, whatever their background or identity, so they "more fully understand and feel affirmed in their identities and experiences and, that they are equipped and empowered to identify and dismantle structural inequities—positioning them to transform society."

Paulina Tervo, my partner in life and work, and I, have always tried to be conscious about representation in our work as filmmakers. We have worked hard to find and tell powerful human stories from a diverse range of backgrounds. Now at Lyfta, we are hugely excited about the array of filmmakers we are working with, from all over the world, as we continue to grow and offer more and more diversity in our stories. Just over half of the documentary stories on Lyfta feature woman central characters.

Lyfta is an online platform that is home to numerous immersive stories from around the world, which we call storyworlds. A storyworld is a real, physical space (e.g. somebody's home or workplace) that students can look around in 360-degrees, on computers or tablets. In each space, users can click on various objects to reveal informative multimedia elements (such as photos, infographics and videos). There is at least one human being in every Lyfta storyworld and, when clicked, this person comes to life and shares their personal story with us through a powerful short documentary film.

Our vision is to give children the opportunity to visit every country in the world, and in each, to meet at least one inspiring human being with a powerful story. Our dream is that by the time a child has completed their education, they'd have seen hundreds of different perspectives and slices of life from all over the globe - to the extent that diversity would be normality - an unremarkable fact of life.

Pictured above: The search page from Lyfta's Teacher Interface. Just over half of the documentary stories on Lyfta feature woman central characters.

Footnotes:

"A balanced world is a better world." (https://www.internationalwomensday.com)
The Hollywood collage: I used Box Office Mojo, IMDB and Wikipedia for information and images. Some actors appear more than once because they starred in more than one box office success over the 10 year period. I didn't include animated films.
"…more fully understand and feel affirmed in their identities and experiences and, that they are equipped and empowered to identify and dismantle structural inequities—positioning them to transform society." (https://www.teachforamerica.org/stories/how-to-engage-culturally-relevant-pedagogy)

By Serdar Ferit

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