For the first time in recent history, the percentage of top-grossing films featuring female protagonists equaled the percentage of films with male protagonists, according to a pair of annual studies released Tuesday.

In recent years the movie industry has gone through the streaming revolution, the pandemic, labor strikes and “Barbenheimer.”.

The hundreds of television series on U.S. broadcast, cable and streaming platforms are the subject of a new list — one that scores them for their diversity and inclusion.

A new study on inclusion in film shows just how much of a rarity “Barbie” is.

This image released by Netflix shows Phoebe Dynevor, left, and Rege-Jean Page in a scene from "Bridgerton." Netflix films were more likely to have women directing (23.1%), writing (25.2%) or producing (29%) than the top-grossing movies of 2018 and 2019. In Netflix films and series, 31.9% of leads were from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. Latino representational lagged especially, accounting for just 4% of film leads and 1.7% of series leads. LGBTQ leads were featured in only 2.3% of Netflix films and series, though 12% of the U.S. population identifies as LGBTQ.

In the most popular films of 2019, protagonists were more diverse than ever, and there were more women were behind the camera. There were no Hispanic speaking characters in 44 of the films; no speaking African Americans in 15 of them; and no speaking Asian characters in 36 movies. Female speaking characters have only marginally increased over the last 13 years, reaching 34% in 2019. People of color speaking characters also still lag behind the U.S. population with 34.3% in 2019. Just 1.4% of speaking characters were LGBTQ, and 2.3% were characters with disability.

I want to commend them for trying and for putting together a criteria because we know criteria is a way to counter bias, said Smith. Five years ago, the film academy endeavored to significantly diversify its own membership. The best picture adjustment is just one of the effort. Others include implementing a set 10 best picture nominees starting at the 94th Oscars and mandatory unconscious bias training for academy members. The best picture standards were specifically designed to be flexible and give latitude to filmmakers.