- Gender

Looking first at gender-identity and how it shows up or does not in the Palme d’Or competition. Gender inequality is a known issue in the film industry, and it is evident in my results.

Director(s)

To get an overall idea of the gender identity of the directors in my dataset, I examined the entire group from 2016 to 2021. Only 16.0% of directors in the dataset are women, while 80.2% are men. Additionally, 3.8% are male ensembles but there are no ensembles that are made up of only women or include women. There are also no nonbinary individuals represented among the entire group of directors.

Next, I looked at the percent of gender-identity year over year for the directors. There is no significant change in representation for the number of male or female directors from year to year; and every year, male directors are in larger numbers than female directors. The results here also show an average of 80% for male directors, and 84% male directors when individuals and ensembles are combined, while the year over year average for female directors is 16% and there are no ensembles that include female directors.

Cast Lead(s) and Character Lead(s)

For the cast leads and character leads, I also took an overall look at gender-identity, like I did with the directors. As with the directors, men are in the majority here but only with 45.3% of the total. Unlike with the directors, there are several male-female ensembles (18.0%) and there is also one nonbinary individual cast lead (0.9%). However, this cast lead does not perform in a nonbinary role and instead portrays a woman; therefore, the percentage of woman cast leads is 29.2% while the percentage of woman character leads is 30.2%.

Looking at the cast and character year over year gender graphics shows that there is some variability in the numbers of male and female leads. For example, 2018 had the highest proportion of individual male leads (57.1%) and 2016 had the lowest (28.6%). In 2016, there were more individual female leads (42.9%) than male (28.6%), though this is the only year that this was the case; and in both 2018 and 2019 the proportion of individual female leads (23.8%) was less than the 2016 proportion of individual male leads (28.6%).

Spotlight on Minoritized Groups

In order to turn a spotlight on a specific minoritized group in the Palme d’Or competition, I created a graphic for the only nonbinary artist in the competition. This single cast lead represents 0.9% of the total cast leads.