Demand change

When you see your opportunities fade, it is quite tough and you feel like a failure.
Lots of us feel like a failure, but it is the system that has failed us

Belinde Ruth Stieve, actress, thought leader on gender and diversity, and creator of NEROPA™ - Neutral Roles Parity, a gender & diversity tool (@Dagmar Morath)

It was all because of my love for cats that on a frosty St. Valentine’s morning I found myself under the high arches of the Milan Central Station. Standing in front of the train that would have taken me to Germany, I looked at the tracks extending outside the building in a foggy, yellow-pale light. I thought about my grandmother who, a fifteen-year old, got on a steam-engine train to come to the city to work as a maid. Two generations later, a bit older then her, I was traveling in the direction she came from (she was born on the border with Austria) to work as an au pair and improve my German. The family wanted a Spanish candidate, but in my introductory letter I mentioned cats and this convinced them I was a good fit anyway. As the train travelled east and then northeast, the plains first and the vineyards later passed in front of my window. When the train reached the Alps, we travelled through a narrow valley between two high walls of mountains and then the names of the railway signs were written in German. 

By the time I left the Hauptbahnhof in Munich, it was snowing. Specks of snow dotted my dark green faux fur coat as I hopped into a pale yellow Mercedes taxi. In a pre-internet time, the address of my destination was written on a piece of paper that I handed out to the driver. We drove along an austere three-lane road, sided by two rows of leafless tall poplars. The car stopped in front of an imposing, modern gothic building painted in light blue and white. A glass door gave way to a marvelous, old wooden staircase that ran in a spiral along the wall of the building and creaked at every step. The staircase surrounded the glass column of the lift and when its doors opened, three blond faces in extra-small, small and medium size looked curiously at me. Their red-haired mother introduced me to the children, showed me around the house, the cat Mathilde (to whom I owed this lucky encounter), and my cozy room: a giant window overlooking the street, a bed, a desk, a bookshelf on three sides of the room with a mezzanine on top and a farm-like ladder to climb up to it. Under the children’s attentive eyes, I put my clothes in the white doll-size wardrobe. One of them gave me a drawing he had just made and we instantly became friends.

I have precious memories of those months. The rational design of the city, the friendliness of its people, the ease of doing things, the extreme simplicity of life. Some sort of subterranean order governed everything like a clock. The mornings began with the local newspaper on the table, a big jar of muesli, homemade jams, Schwartzbrot, butter and fresh milk. I learned about ecological choices decades before the word became mainstream. I carried a wooden basket with glass bottles to fill up at the milk dispenser in the local supermarket. I walked on the right-hand side of the pavement, away from the always-busy bike lanes. I sat at coffee shops with friends eating Bavarian-style Dampfnudel,  discovered the untold pleasure of having a Biergarten a step away from home, and the ease of the evening Brotzeit. There were weekends in the countryside, barefoot children walking immense and peaceful cows back to the farm, strawberry picking on a sunny afternoon. One day, without any warning, something in my brain clicked and I began to understand when people spoke. The beauty of the German language, with its elegant structure, came over me like a wave. It sounded like bewitching music. I listened, and listened, and listened. 

When I talked with Belinde Ruth Stieve the other day, her accent, her bluntness, and her silvery laugh brought me back to Germany and I felt a bout of melancholia for those long-gone days. I also felt empowered by Belinde’s story. Belinde Ruth Stieve is an actress and the founder of NEROPA™ - Neutral Roles Parity, a gender & diversity tool designed to increase the proportion of women and encourage diversity onscreen, on stage, in novels and games, and to sensitize and raise awareness among those involved. In the face of discrimination, Belinde proves there’s always something we can do, even if it’s just measuring its perimeter. And this, as she demonstrates, is no little feat.

Tell us about yourself and your story.

I am an actress. I used to do theatre, and then moved on to film and television.  When I got over 40, it was getting more and more difficult to find work. I had fewer projects and was also invited to significantly fewer auditions.

I mean, it wasn't only that I didn't get parts, there weren't so many potential roles available anymore. When you asked casting directors, ‘what's your new project, anything in it for me?’  and they said, “No, we're only looking for women between 15 and 25, or over 70.” Then I thought, maybe they're just using this as an excuse, but really they don't want me, and that was when I started counting to find out. 

What do you mean by “counting?”

I made tally sheets, counting female and male roles in sample groups of films, for example, the TV movies with the highest ratings, the top 100 German cinema films, films nominated for awards, films at festivals, Germany’s top cop drama and so on. There were always at least twice as many male roles as female roles, sometimes even three times more. I also started evaluating the percentage of women and men behind the camera, but that’s another story. On screen I also did several age evaluations, which is a lot of work of course, because you have to find out everybody's ages - and there it was clear that the female roles in fiction started to decline 10, 15 years earlier than male roles. That's for Germany, but it's the same in the UK and other European countries. At first, both age curves rise, you have more roles the older the characters get. But then the female curve has its peak in the age group 36 to 40. When you look at the male roles, they go up to 51 to 55, or even 56 to 60 and then they gradually decline, whereas for females over 40 in front of the camera, there are far fewer roles. You have a handful of older actresses who get the few parts there are. The majority of actresses who used to have regular work, instead, get sorted out. 

When did you start your analysis?

In 2013. I started with the sample groups of films we talked about earlier. Of course, for the top 100 German films I didn't do a full age analysis of the casts, that would have been too much for me, so I just looked at the first actor or actress of each cast, the lead. What was really interesting, for the – fewer – women, the strongest age group were children. So when you have a female lead, it's very likely to be a children's movie, something with girls and horses, for example. The under 18 was the biggest age group. Compared with TV, the cut-out age in cinema is even lower and this applies to men also, but still they are older than women.

How many movies and TV series have you analyzed since 2013?

Hundreds. As I said, it's always been sample groups. Now, I also get assignments, for example, to check the prime time crime films of a specific regional broadcaster, or to look at certain departments off-screen: composers, DoP (directors of photography) etc. This top cop drama I mentioned is called "Tatort" (Crime Scene), which roughly has 35 new 90-minute-films every year. I've been analyzing the data since 2011, so I can show changes, in the gender of the leading coppers, in the main departments, etc. For example, there are now far more female directors than say five years ago, which is good and a result of the constant work of lobby organizations of female filmmakers. At the same time, the age distribution of the cast hasn't changed from 2013 to 2019. Also, as I evaluated last year, there is this age-related phenomenon among the directors. The hired women are younger than the men.

Are you the only one doing research in this area?

Oh no, fortunately not. In 2017, a big study on "Audiovisual Diversity" was published by Professor Elizabeth Prommer and her team at Rostock University. This year, they published a new edition of it. They‘ve done other research as well and other universities are also starting in this area.

How do your and Professor Prommer’s results compare?

Naturally her results are far more detailed, as she has a big team, assistants, students and more who can collect the data. They measure screen times to determine the "size" of roles. As for me, I'm on my own. I just look at the protagonists, which are something like 8 to 15 roles on average, and at the first role on the cast sheet. Professor Prommer determines the protagonists according to the plot, but they are usually the first names on the list. The bottom line is that her results 100% confirm the findings from my sample analysis. Their research is much more detailed of course. They also look at non-fiction TV and children’s programs. But they also determined that there are twice as many male over female roles in fiction, and that female characters start disappearing from an earlier age. They looked in great detail into the depicted onscreen violence against women, which is something I’ve also been writing about.

The reason why we get the same results is because we are taking a picture of the same reality. Of course, any one film can be different, but when you have a group of films, the results don’t change. It’s the same everywhere. When they say in the US, they are so much better, it's rubbish. They said, “We now have ‘female-driven films,’ like Star Wars 7,” but only a quarter of all roles were female. Yes, the lead was a woman, Rey, played by Daisy Ridley. She was in the most scenes overall, but the biggest part of the dialogues and scenes with dialogues went to the character Finn, a man. 

Still people protested: “Oh, a female lead in Star Wars! How can this be?” There was that spin-off Rogue One, and they said, “Oh, this is so wonderful. It's female-driven and diverse.” If you look at the film poster, there are eight people. Surprise, surprise, one woman, seven men. The men were diverse. They were Black and Asian, and White. One of them was blind, one  was old, one an android, but there was only one woman. And how diverse can one person be? Not much. So she was young, of course, and beautiful and white. Right.

How does NEROPA address these issues and how is it received?

I invented NEROPA™ in 2016 to bring about change. After three years of research there was enough evidence of systematic gender imbalance and lack in diversity, so time to act. The way it works is that NEROPA first reduces gender inequality and then diversifies the cast in all roles, not just the small ones. Because that has already happened before from time to time. A nameless male taxi-driver is turned into a woman and so on. But it's important to check all roles, to break this customary male-focused storytelling. For each role, we ask, “does this role have to be a man?” and maybe you have ten roles where you say it doesn't matter, as they are neutral roles. Each of these roles is assigned alternatively to a woman and a man, starting with the biggest role. After this step, we work on diversity, age, race, disabilities and so on.

It's a group of three people from different film departments that does the first NEROPA check for all roles. The second, I call it the NEROPA Fine-tuning, can be done by the Casting Director, given the right instructions and competences. 

What you get at the end is a less-stereotyped picture. I talk about NEROPA on panels at film festivals or other events. I work a lot with Women in Film and Television and there are some well-known directors and authors who work with my method when writing their scripts or casting a film. NEROPA is used for theatre productions and I am hoping to make a difference within the gaming industry as well, as their story-telling is very, very male-oriented.

It's really difficult to pinpoint ageism. Your work is a litmus paper of our culture. 

Thank you! It's this basic use of tally sheets and colored pencils. First start with blue, pink and green to mark people. I use blue for women, pink for men, and green for the neutrals / undetermined ones. If you do this with any group of people, be it a film cast or a government cabinet, you immediately get the picture. And if you use other colors, you can work out the existing or missing diversity. You see if there is a variety of ages, of ethnicities, sexual identities and preferences, people with a handicap, or who are pregnant, who don't fit the average body image, and so on. In my NEROPA workshops, I use wooden 3-part play figures with different colors for this, that’s quite visual and tactile. 

The point is that we take what we see for granted, and it shapes our way of looking at the world. Take the news, for example. In Germany, there are many women reading the news and, of course, they are all beautiful and younger than their male colleagues. I did the age-analysis for the two or three most important news programs on public television. It was interesting that women started younger and ended their career earlier than men who started later, even much later, and stayed on longer. 

I've recently applied the same lenses to the weather forecast on the news. The pattern is even weirder as, on average, men are also older than women, and the women are slimmer and more beautiful. What‘s even more astonishing is that most men presenting the weather forecast are actually meteorologists, but most women are actresses. Possibly hired for their looks and presence in front of the camera. Are female meteorologists not good-looking enough for TV?

It’s like in the movie The Matrix: once you know where to look, you see ageism and other forms of misrepresentation everywhere. Is there a way out of it?

There can be ways out, but we need to keep our awareness alive and look at the whole picture. For example, I think that people get tired of the woman-issue and say, ‘Oh, that's finished now.’ Now they have other topics like ethnic diversity, gender diversity, sexual diversity. They forget age, disability, body image, social background, etc. and they forget the women. We recently had a German film that won some national film prize and everybody was thrilled because it had a Black lead, many Black actors, many with ethnic backgrounds, but there were only two women in the cast. And guess what? They were prostitutes.

If you look, it's everywhere. I saw a tweet the other day, a manager said that on his board he had two Black Americans, one with Asian background, one with a disability and one woman. What does it mean? Is the woman Black, does she have a disability? No, she's just a woman. It's like ticking a box: I have one woman on a board of nine people. The others, the non-women, they’re very diverse. How different it would be, if instead he said I want 50 percent  women, and then diversify all, women, men, everyone. That would be the way, but in Germany and I think in other countries as well, they say we’ve talked about gender equality for so long, we have done it. So, let’s move on.

What is your recipe to address sexism and sex ageism?

I use colors, diagrams, photos, entertaining text, humor. I provide people with new angles, unusual forms of representation. For example, the very fact that I use pink in my diagrams for the share of men is irritating for many, but it makes them look and listen more carefully and think about what is considered normal.

Anti-discrimination risks losing sight of the nuance…

You can see it very clearly in Germany, for example, with Turkish actresses. Most of the time, they are in roles where they are suppressed by their family. Of course, this happens in Germany and it's horrible, but this is not the reality for the majority of Turkish German women. But they are still represented wearing the headscarf in some submissive role, and always sort of the victim and they're not. We need to get rid of our own stereotypes.

Another part of the equation happens behind the scenes, right?

I did the investigations behind the camera. That is another proof of the detrimental effects of a limited focus. Everybody is talking about female directed films. When they talk at a festival, they will say how many female directors there are in the competition, but what about the story? If the story is really bad, it doesn't matter who directs it. You can only change it a bit. For example, in the top cop drama in Germany, there are so many young women being killed, it’s incredible. The film starts with them being killed, or brutally raped and then dead. You see them half naked, and then you see them on the coroner’s table completely naked. Nobody seems to think this is strange. Well, not nobody. But the audience is so getting used to it, because we see it so often. It's in the scripts, and 80-90% of them are written by men. So what could a female director do if the plot is already lined out like this?

Also thanks to lobbying groups like Pro Quote Film - promoting a 50% share for women behind the camera - the quota for women directors, as I said earlier, has gone up. But the same doesn’t apply for scriptwriters. The number of women scriptwriters really dropped during the same time. Then, there are the gatekeepers, those who say, “Yes, we can have more films by female directors, as long as we don't have fewer for the men.” So how can this work? If you say quality is your North Star, you would pick the best men and the best women. If the majority of the slots are reserved for men as it is now, it is a recipe to include mediocre writers too. And finally, the same “rules” apply to the camera department. If the director of photography is a man, what do you get if not the male gaze?

Do you notice that the UK is more open to work with NEROPA compared with Germany?

Well, not the whole industry, but there is a great interest in the method, yes. It has been made mandatory for a film funding application. It’s included by the BFI in the Guidance for funded projects and in the theatre casting toolkit, etc. A lot of directors and producers have worked with it in their productions, but at the same time, they have the same sexism and the same gender pay gap as we have in Germany, they have the same ageism in TV.  

I don't know if you heard of the TV series Last Tango in Halifax? It’s a lovely series, but it took ten years until finally it was done. It was always rejected, because it's a love story between two people in their 70s, who were in love when they were 20 and then lost sight of each other, and met again, 50 years later. You have their daughters and grandchildren; you have stories of all ages. It took the creator Sally Wainwright so long to get it finally done, because who wants to see that? Everybody did. It was very successful. Things on the big screen are different. An example is Ridley Scott directing a new Napoleon film. Historically, Josephine, Napoleon’s wife, was six years older than him. Now, the actress playing Josephine (Jodie Comer) is 19 years younger than Joaquin Phoenix, the actor playing Napoleon.

Because of your work how has your approach to getting older changed? 

First of all, I never really had a problem with getting older. As far as my work situation was concerned, in a way, it was comforting to know it was not me, but it was also frustrating, because I realized that there really are too few roles for actresses when they age. So I can't get the career I was hoping for, maybe even deserve. If there are no roles, there’s not much I can do. Many actresses drop out, they start training as a yoga teacher or a coach or a teacher, or work in alternative medicine or whatever, get a day job. Others stay, but there are not enough roles. My method, NEROPA, will result in more roles for women and for older women as well. But that's not enough. We need a new approach to films and story-telling.

Sometimes, I think change won't happen during my active working life. The change is too slow and that's very frustrating. Because normally you say, if you set your mind to something, you can do it. I can write a script, find producers, and find the money. Even if I did that, which is a lot of work, it’s one film, one role, one series, not a radical change. It saddens me that working opportunities for my generation of actresses might not change a lot before we retire.

Has your journey - with your research, your reflections, your writing - helped you to cope with self-ageism, the ageist view we have of ourselves?

The good thing for me was that I was never beautiful. When I was 25, all the casting directors would say ‘A good face, a character face.’ I was interesting looking, but it was clear I would never play the flawless beauty. In a way that has helped me to age, because I didn’t have the shock of suddenly not being attractive any more, because I was never in this common-way attractive.

When you came to realize how things work in your industry, what did you think?

It was a great relief. Because being an actress, we're always very sensitive and think, “Oh, it's me, it's me.” I had a chance to realize that no, it's not my lack of talent or whatever. It's just mainly the age thing now. And luck of course. 

Nobody prepares us to face ageism. At least, you have the awareness that comes from your study, but the majority of women and men are just left out without explanation, without anything. What is your take?

You’re right. When you go to acting school, nobody tells you that. I have a friend, who is an old ex-actress in her 70s. She recalled her mother telling her, “Yes, you can become an actress, but first train for a proper job.” So she trained in a bookshop. When she got older and didn‘t want to work in a theatre any more, partly because of the new young directors wanting to explain theatre to her, she left and opened a bookshop, and started writing as well. I would definitely tell all people who want to become actors, and especially actresses, to have a second option and something they can live on in bad times. 

You see, when you go to a film premiere or film festival and people always ask, “What are you doing at the moment, what are you shooting?” And if you can't say anything, you feel like, “Oh, God, everybody's doing something, except me.” It is quite tough and you feel like a failure. Lots of us feel like a failure, but it is the system that has failed us.