female characters in Star Trek Secret Voyage
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I also applaud this approach. Star Trek is very guilty of low level sexism right across the franchuse. The writers consistently seem to think that having a few high-profile token female characters makes up for a general lack of women in significant roles.
I've read the Star Trek 2012 Spectacular this weekend and without exception the men outnumber the women by more than 2:1:
TNG: 5 men, 2 women, with Picard, Q, Riker, and Data getting most of the lines.
Pike: Landing party consists of 3 men, 1 woman, bridge crew (old) 5 men, 2 women, bridge crew (new) 6 men, 1 woman; with Pike and Colt getting most of the lines (token female syndrome)
Gorn: Landing party 4 men, 1 woman
This is astonishngly bad. All the artists have to do is draw women in the background to give us more women without lines and they can't even manage that.
So the question has to be, fan fiction included, why is Trek STILL so sexist across the board in the 21st century?
I will admit, I tried doing a fan story on Youtube and you have to work quite hard to even up the numbers because so many of the established characters are male. I tried to get around it by elevating Rand back up to the status of a female lead, using Chapel's own niche of bio-research instead of defaulting to McCoy all the time, introducing a recurring female security officer, and trying to make sure that I evened out the sexes of the guest characters. However, because I'm using images from TMP, it's actually quite hard to find enough decent pictures of the women.
If after all this time the producers, writers, and artists still can't grasp that equality means equal numbers of women in equally prominent roles, I don't hold out much hope of Trek even getting close to the levels of equality that we saw in NuBSG.
I've read the Star Trek 2012 Spectacular this weekend and without exception the men outnumber the women by more than 2:1:
TNG: 5 men, 2 women, with Picard, Q, Riker, and Data getting most of the lines.
Pike: Landing party consists of 3 men, 1 woman, bridge crew (old) 5 men, 2 women, bridge crew (new) 6 men, 1 woman; with Pike and Colt getting most of the lines (token female syndrome)
Gorn: Landing party 4 men, 1 woman
This is astonishngly bad. All the artists have to do is draw women in the background to give us more women without lines and they can't even manage that.
So the question has to be, fan fiction included, why is Trek STILL so sexist across the board in the 21st century?
I will admit, I tried doing a fan story on Youtube and you have to work quite hard to even up the numbers because so many of the established characters are male. I tried to get around it by elevating Rand back up to the status of a female lead, using Chapel's own niche of bio-research instead of defaulting to McCoy all the time, introducing a recurring female security officer, and trying to make sure that I evened out the sexes of the guest characters. However, because I'm using images from TMP, it's actually quite hard to find enough decent pictures of the women.
If after all this time the producers, writers, and artists still can't grasp that equality means equal numbers of women in equally prominent roles, I don't hold out much hope of Trek even getting close to the levels of equality that we saw in NuBSG.
I agree with everything you said. I suppose one could argue that in modern times, men still outnumber women in high status positions, and fictional films are just a reflection of current society. But Trek takes place in the future, so that excuse goes right out the window.
On the other hand, I don't think filmmakers have any obligation to apply politically correct standards to casting decisions. If a film works better with a mostly male cast, that's perfectly OK. This is art, not politics, and the goal is to entertain an audience.
But this is what I don't understand ... who on earth is going to be offended or turned off if women are given 50 percent of the primary roles? It was a much different situation in 1966, when the networks were afraid to cast independent women, fearing it would alienate the audience. But today? The modern female audience will respond very positively to more female roles. And the male audience? Most men enjoy seeing intelligent, attractive women on screen. I just can't imagine any red-blooded American male saying he didn't like a Trek film because there were too many women in the cast.
Politics aside, from a purely artistic viewpoint, a male dominated cast in a futuristic fictional film just doesn't make any sense.
I also don't have a problem with sexist casting where appropriate - Mad Men is male dominated; so is Stargate because they are reflecting institutions at a moment in time. I agree that this doesn't apply to Star Trek in the slightest. However, I would also say that, despite my initial surprise, having a black Guinevere in BBC1's Merlin has become business as usual and Angel Coulby is one of the best things in the show. Whether she was employed in a effort to have a politically correct racially diverse cast or not is irrelevant (and I suspect she just auditioned like everybody else) because the woman is awesome.
On the second point I couldn't agree more! I really just don't understand the logic of a male dominated cast at all. It would obviously be win/win to have more women and yet they still don't seem to grasp the notion. Default casting is always male unless somebody gives some thought to making the character a woman (which is why most female characters get a love interest sub-plot). Even Seven of Nine was conceived as a man until they decided to get rid of Kes. Replacing Harry Kim with a woman hadn't occurred to them. At least the gap left by security chief Tasha Yar was filled by a new female character - the bartender Guinan...
I have always felt that the guys outnumbered the women in every Trek show. Voyager was probably the most equal- not just because the captain was female. In my upcoming animated fan series there will be equal men to women ratio. I'm glad I'm not the only person who thought this.
Voyager is deceptive. It scores because its women are in prominent positions (captain, engineer, reformed borg) so they get quite a very decent contribution to the story. It's interesting that Chaoktay was left without a clear niche to fill partly as a result of this so that his character was woefully underdeveloped as a result.
But once you strip out the top six men and women you will find almost exclusively male character beneath them. If Janeway had gotten her way, she would not have had a single woman in her senior crew following the initial disaster. I think this stems from a failure on the part of the writers to introduce interesting and varied support characters of both sexes. Kes should have been kept around until after Year of Hell in my view and they should have made more of the twins and of Wildman (i.e. give her some personality of note and a couple of stories that were not simply 'mommy' stories).
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Janeway's helmsman, who was killed in the pilot episode, was a female officer. She interacted with Tom Paris when they were in the shuttle heading for Voyager/DS9. I'm not sure if she was a senior officer or not, but she was a bridge officer, so I think she qualifies. I think a lot of people here are too preoccupied with male/female ratios. In the real world, you are not usually going to end up with a crew that is 50/50. You will usually end up with more of one gender in a crew of people.
The reason that Star Trek tends to have more male characters is because the series attracts a larger male demographic. TNG had more male characters, and attracted a larger male audience than Voyager ever did. For the studio, it is all about the money, and they will try to attract the largest audience possible. DS9 and Voyager both had well written roles for women, and I think we will continue to see strong female characters in Star Trek, regardless of the ratios.
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Are you mad!? Don't bring common sense and logic to a Trek BBS discussion!
Although, in all seriousness, I love how friendly and polite everyone has been in this thread.
Yes, Stadi was cool but the chief engineer, chief medical officer, chief security officer, and ops officer were all male - helmsman is pretty much bottom of that pile.
I agree, that a precise 50/50 isn't a requirement and I don't sit down and count the exact male to female ratio in every show. However, the male to female ratio in Trek has blatantly been at least 2:1 since its inception. If we sometimes had more men and sometimes more women, who would care? It's the consistent lack of women that deomnstrates a sexist trend so clearly over and over again.
Plus I don't find the argument that male sci fi fans want to see more men in sci fi shows to be that logical at all... I mean, think about it...
Voyager's relative lack of success is probably partly because fans were Trek starved when TNG when through its growing pains, partly because Voyager wasn't as well written as (later) TNG and partly because Patrick Stewart is a particularly compelling lead actor. Voyager was still pretty successful - more so than Enterprise. Xena was more popular than Hercules because Lucy Lawless was a more compelling lead. Alias was also hugely popular I assume because of Jennifer Garner's vast array of wigs (although it still had more men than women for most of its history, it didn't fare too badly on the equality stakes).
In NuBSG, I seriously doubt that they achieved a 50/50 ratio. However, they had a balance of 3:3 in the main cast, probably a slight male imbalance in the second tier characters, a roughly even split with the tertiery characters and a 50/50 ratio with the human cylons. They probably had more women in civilian roles compared to men in the military roles but overall it wasn't too bad. They are certainly waaaay ahead of Trek in the equality stakes and it never looked as if they were consciously trying to prove any kind of a point beyond the 'controversial' recasting of Starbuck and Boomer as women. More power to them.
I wasn't suggesting that male sci-fi fans want to see more men than women in the shows. It was that the studio tends to have more male characters appear in Star Trek in key recurring roles, because the series has traditionally attracted a larger male demographic. Here is the thing about TOS and TNG: both series often had female characters appear as the main guest stars. Every other episode of TOS featured a female guest star, who would be important to that episode, but never be seen or mentioned again. After Tasha's death, TNG had a fair number of female guest stars who would appear from time to time, like Guinan and Ensign Ro, that played an integral part in the episodes they appeared in (often getting more screen time than Troi and Crusher).
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All I know is, when my wife wanted to audition for Star Ship AJAX, she was VERY excited about the idea of wearing the mini. She just thought it would be a real blast...and the chance to wear a mini in command gold, even better! We discussed it at length, and her feelings were that a mini was perfectly fine for shipboard duty or diplomatic meet n greets, but that the tunic/slacks combo would be a must for landing parties, as long as the tunic is tailored and fitted properly to show off the curves, just like the mini does. Her feeling is, got nice stems? Show em off! 
How many of the featured guest starring women were there as love interests for a male character? In its later years TNG managed to get to grips with female guests who were not love interests but Farscape got there long before them.
The mini skirt is iconic - I don't mind that so much and if they doubled the number of women wearing them that's fine too. I would like those women to be more than decorative and more than love interests though.
The mini skirt is iconic - I don't mind that so much and if they doubled the number of women wearing them that's fine too. I would like those women to be more than decorative and more than love interests though.
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