Interesting, looking back:
watching Star Trek First Contact, and the first 6 actor credits are men; then Gates McFadden & Marina Sirtis.
Perhaps those first six actors are highest paid, "most popular" or have agents that negotiate better … but it makes me ask some questions. About the "Hollywood system", about inequality in # of lines by gender, and in pay.
That was 30 years ago. But a 2016 analysis of 2000 scripts (2 million lines) showed # lines by gender is still drastically unbalanced.
@deborahh@cosocial.ca I had to look up the credits, for others see below:
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Credits_for_Star_Trek:_First_Contact
I think it was a product of its time and the people who helped write it. We really didn't even get a women captain until voyager and you could tell that it took a while for them to even figure out how to avoid the far ends of the diversity/discrimination pendulum swing to make a good character. the writers seemed to have good intentions by making a capable technical women as the leader but somehow forgot to make Janeway believable (captain, mechanic, scientist, and philosopher capable of sparring with a vulcan?) while leaning into the native American stereotypes with chakotay. it's taken a long time to get sci-fi from monster of the week or gunsmoke in space to a more entertaining experience for everyone but I would say star trek was one of the leaders in the genre for the time. Still more work to do!
Deborah Preuss, pcc 🇨🇦
