IMDb Has Introduced A New Rating To Highlight Films Created By Women

No matter how much Hollywood likes to pat itself on the back for being progressive, gender inequality is still an enormous issue in the film industry. Recent studies have found that less than a third of speaking roles in major motion pictures go to women, while last year of the 250 highest grossing films a paltry seven per cent were directed by women.

In order to draw attention to this troubling disparity and encourage users to seek out more films the showcase female talent, the Internet Movie Database has implemented a new rating system to highlight films starring, written, or directed by women.

The F-rating was originally introduced by Bath Film Festival director Holly Tarquini, and has since been adopted by more than 40 cinemas and film festivals around the UK.

So far 21,800 films in the database have been tagged with the F-rating, with IMDb chief Col Needham calling it “a great way to highlight women on screen and behind the camera.”

Tarquini praised IMDb for taking up the rating system. “It’s exciting when new organisations decide to join us in shining a light both on the brilliant work women are doing in film and on how far the film industry lags behind most other industries, when it comes to providing equal opportunities to women,” she said.

“Our real goal,” Tarquini added, “is to reach the stage when the F-rating is redundant because 50 per cent of the stories we see on screen are told by and about film’s unfairly under-represented half of the population – women.”

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h/t BBC