page_title: Geena Davis
section_title: Activism
hierarchical_section_title: Geena Davis / Personal life / Activism
caption_attribution_description: Actor Geena Davis visited the NIH in April 2011 to discuss the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in the Media.
context_page_description: Virginia Elizabeth "Geena" Davis is an American actress, advocate, executive producer, and former model. She is the recipient of several accolades, including an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award, in addition to nominations for a BAFTA Award and a Primetime Emmy Award. In 2019, she was given the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for the work she has done over the decades to fight gender bias on and off the screen in Hollywood.
  Having graduated with a bachelor's degree in drama from Boston University in 1979, Davis signed with New York's Zoli modeling agency and started her career as a model. She made her acting debut in the film Tootsie, in 1986 she starred in the thriller The Fly, which proved to be one of her first box office hits. While the fantasy comedy Beetlejuice brought her to international prominence, the drama The Accidental Tourist earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She cemented her leading actress status with her performance in the road film Thelma & Louise, receiving a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
context_section_description: Davis is a supporter of the Women's Sports Foundation and an advocate for Title IX, an Act of Congress focusing on equality in sports opportunities, now expanded to prohibit gender discrimination in United States' educational institutions.
  In 2004, while watching children's television programs and videos with her daughter, Davis noticed an imbalance in the ratio of male to female characters. Davis went on to sponsor the largest research project ever undertaken on gender in children's entertainment (resulting in four discrete studies, including one on children's television) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. The study, directed by Stacy Smith, showed that there were nearly three males to every one female character in the nearly 400 G, PG, PG-13, and R-Rated movies the undergraduate team of Annenberg students analyzed. In 2005, Davis teamed up with the non-profit group, Dads and Daughters, to launch a venture dedicated to balancing the number of male and female characters in children's television and movie programming.
  Davis launched the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2007. The Institute's first focus is an on-the-ground program that works collaboratively with the entertainment industry to dramatically increase the presence of female characters in media aimed at children and to reduce stereotyping of females by the male-dominated industry. It seeks to address inequality in Hollywood. For her work in this field she received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Bates College in May 2009 and the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, an Honorary Oscar, in 2019.
  In 2011, Davis became one of a handful of celebrities attached to USAID and Ad Council's FWD campaign, an awareness initiative tied to that year's East Africa drought. She joined Uma Thurman, Chanel Iman and Josh Hartnett in television and internet ads to "forward the facts" about the crisis.
caption: Geena Davis in April 2011 with Dr. John Gallin at the National Institute of Health to discuss the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.
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