Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Geena Davis for the McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. Does lopsided male representation in media skew our perceptions? Geena Davis believes it does and that corporations have a critical role in driving change.

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Working on films that resonated with female audiences like Thelma and Louise and A League of Their Own heightened my awareness of how few opportunities women have to feel empowered coming out of a movie. But it wasn’t until I had my first child that I noticed a similar problem in children’s media, and its surprising link to the issues that plague us in adulthood.

When my daughter was a toddler, and I started watching little kids’ TV shows and G-rated movies with her, I was thunderstruck by the stunning dearth of female characters. But no one else seemed to be noticing. My friends were completely surprised when I pointed it out. If I happened to be in a meeting with a studio executive or a producer, I would ask them about it and, to a person, they reassured me that the problem had already been fixed. I realized I wouldn’t get anywhere without the numbers. So, I commissioned the largest study ever done on children’s television and films and founded my Institute on Gender in Media, to engage the industry through research, events, and educational programs.

When we present the data to studios and content creators, their jaws are on the ground. In family films, the ratio of male to female characters is 3:1. Shockingly, the ratio of male to female characters has been exactly the same since 1946. Of the characters with jobs, 81 percent are male. Female characters in G-rated animated movies wear the same amount of sexually revealing clothing as female characters in R-rated films, which is simply bizarre if you think about it. And even more baffling, women make up only 17 percent of characters in crowd scenes.

In many segments of society — Fortune 500 boards, law partners, tenured professors, Congress — the percentage of women stalls out at around 17 percent. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. We all grew up watching vast amounts of media with the same ratio. What if we’re conditioned to see 17 percent as the norm?

This fall, we completed the first global study of gender depictions in movies, analyzing 120 films across the ten most profitable film markets. The landscape is no less bleak. For speaking or named characters, 31 percent were female—males made up 69 percent. Only 23 percent of films featured a female leading or coleading character. In all, only 10 percent of the films we studied had a gender-balanced cast (where women made up 45 to 55 percent of the characters).

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For more on the research discussed in this article, see the recent report Gender bias without borders, on the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media’s website.

Geena Davis is the founder and chair of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.

Here is a direct link to the complete article and the video that accompanies it.