At some point in her life, just about every girl dreams of being an actress, lighting up the silver screen in daring and glamorous roles.  But in her presentation in the Hariri building yesterday, Academy-Award winner Geena Davis explained why, in this age, such aspirations are very difficult to achieve.

The McDonough School of Business and the Georgetown University Women’s Leadership Initiative welcomed Davis to campus yesterday afternoon as part of the MSB’s Distinguished Leaders Lecture Series.  Davis shared with the audience the work of her non-profit organization, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which researches why modern cinema features so few women in strong roles and seeks to raise awareness in filmmakers about this disparity.

The Institute has undertaken the largest amount of research that has ever been done on how women are portrayed in films and television.  The findings are often sought out by non-governmental organizations, and companies concerned with female empowerment.

Davis began her mission when she noticed the gender imbalance in the films targeted at her young children.

“I was so horrified at what they were watching,” she said. “ Unconsciously, they’re just taking in this message that girls are less important than boys.”

The Institute has found that female characters generally fit a weak, over-sexualized mold.  “In animated films, most of the female characters have a body type that couldn’t exist in real life… they very often don’t have room for a spinal column!” Davis said.

At 6’1”, Davis does not fit this stereotype of female physicality.  She started her career in modeling in attempt to segue into acting, but was very self-conscious about her height and looks.

“I was so sure that I was not attractive and that I was tricking them somehow, that I knew how to act that my butt looked good,” she said.

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The GUNS girls would not approve…

Editor’s Note: In this week’s cover story, Molly Redden reported on Georgetown’s sordid, besotted past. In her research, she found some interesting insights into Georgetown’s gender relations in the mid-1960s.

This week’s cover story identifies 1966 as the start of two decades of outright debauchery at Georgetown, that being the year that the University first allowed alcohol in boys’ dorms. But not everyone was immediately ready to give in to lady liquor.

On November 3, The Hoya published “The GUNS Girl—Balancing Binge and Brain to Combat Conformity,” a recap of a symposium it had held where eight female GU Nursing School students indicated that they were anything but fine with extending the drinking-tolerant policy to girls’ dorms.

Some of the choicest quotes from the article include, “I’d hate to think of every girl sitting around, boozing it up,” and, “If you sit in and get binged every Friday well then you’re not right … in the head.”

“One girl,” the Hoya author wrote, “thought that drunk boys were at least funny, while the same cannot be said for drunk girls.”

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In the past Vox has analyzed the gender breakdown of GUSA candidates, but we figured it was about time to take a look at the composition of a slightly more powerful group: Georgetown’s major administrators and academic program heads.

Although City Paper‘s The Sexist blog named us the Manliest of the Thinkers in its Manliest Workplace in D.C. competition (which took into account at the gender of the company’s top ten employees—nine of whom were male at Georgetown), we’re curious about how we look when you go a little bit beyond the top ten.

Here’s what we found:

Click on image to enlarge. You can also view the data as a series of pie charts.

Overall, it’s a much more balanced view than what you’d get from The Sexist’s analysis. Women hold a majority of positions in the administration of the College, the SFS and the NHS, and also constitute a majority of academic department leaders in NHS and in the College’s humanities programs.

There are some trouble spots for gender equality, though. Most notably, the College’s science departments are entirely male-run, and the MSB’s leadership is 87.5% male. The SFS’s academic programs are 80% male-run and 70% of Georgetown’s major administrators are men.

Interestingly, areas that are mostly female-run tend to be more equally divided, with between 48 and 37 percent of the positions filled by men; male-dominated areas are more polarized, with only 30 percent or less of the positions filled by women.