Societal changes can often be traced through popular culture media. Our research examines how the portrayal of women in popular films from two time periods (the 1950s and 2014) has changed over the years. We hypothesized that between these two movie eras we will see an increase of stereotypic “masculine” behaviors and a decrease in stereotypic “feminine” behaviors for women. We examined five of the top-grossing films from the 1950s and five of the top-grossing films of 2014, assessing women’s roles, behaviors, and interactions in each film. We adopted a system of evaluation based on prior research studies, using five-point Likert scales to assess the presence of specific characteristics. We will evaluate portrayals across the five films from each time period and then compare mean ratings between the two eras in the effort to evaluate possible change. We hope that our findings will encourage awareness of gender portrayals in popular culture, including possible gender stereotypes, potentially changing the way viewers respond to such images.
