On paper, 2017 was a banner year for female protagonists in film. The year's top three movies at the box office were Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Wonder Woman, and Beauty and the Beast, all of which featured a woman in the leading role. But according to a depressing new study, the number of female protagonists in film actually decreased last year.

San Diego's Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film conducts an annual investigation into gender in Hollywood films, and its newly-released 2017 results show that women made up only 24 percent of protagonists in last year's top-grossing films—that's five percent fewer than in 2016.

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And that's not all. The study also measures how many films feature 10 or more female characters with speaking roles, and that was just 32 percent in 2017, compared to 79 percent of films that featured 10 or more male characters with speaking roles. The overall number of female characters in top-grossing movies stayed static year-over-year; it was 37 percent in both 2016 and 2017.

Even the good news isn't all that great: the number of female characters of color increased slightly, but the numbers remain bleak. Latina female characters saw the biggest increase, from three percent to seven percent, while black female characters went from 14 percent to 16 percent, and Asian female characters went from six percent to seven percent.

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And lest we forget the equal importance of gender equality behind the camera, the study also found that films directed or written by a woman fared much better with female representation: 45 percent of films with either a female director or writer had a female protagonist, versus 20 percent of films with all-male creative teams.

Sigh.

From: AR Revista