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Have you ever noticed how television shows and movies contain more male characters? Geena Davis did, and she decided to do something about it. The Thelma and Louise star says that Hollywood has encouraged unconscious gender bias, and she began to take notice when she was watching a show with her young daughter.

“It all started when my daughter was two years old and I sat down with her to watch her first preschool show,” Geena Davis told the crowd during her A League of Her Own panel at C2E2 2026. “I had this Spidey Sense about how women are portrayed from having been in a certain movie with two women. The reaction to that movie was so strong that it made me realize how few opportunities we were giving women to come out of a theater feeling excited and empowered by the female characters. So, I start watching the show with this mindset and within five minutes I’m like, ‘How many female characters are there in this show?’ And I Googled it, and there was one, and a lot of male characters.”

“I started seeing it everywhere. In a movie that came out, in a video we watched, it was like really bereft of female characters. And stuff made for the littlest kids. I went to the thought that we’re training kids to have unconscious gender bias if we show them wildly disparate worlds.”

This led to Davis starting the Geena Davis Institute. The goal of the organization was to work with the entertainment industry to create gender balance and reduce negative stereotypes; Davis founded the organization in 2004, but not everyone was on board right away.

“I sponsored the largest research study ever done on gender depiction in kids movies and TV. Then I launched this whole institute,” she explained. “The reason I thought I had an idea that would work is before I launched anything I would just ask other people. I have a lot of meetings all the time. A director, a producer, or whoever. I would say, ‘Have you ever noticed how few female characters there are in movies made for kids?’ And every single person said, ‘No, no, no, that isn’t true anymore. That has been fixed.’ And they would name a movie with one female character as proof that gender inequality was over. So, I thought, ‘Okay, this is utterly unconscious.’ If I had the data, I could go directly to them.”

And that’s just what Davis has been doing for the past two decades. The Geena Davis Institute claims that two-thirds of media professionals have applied the research to their projects, leading to more female inclusive movies and TV shows. The battle against gender bias won’t be won overnight, but thanks to Davis, we’ve made some serious progress.