Why there are fewer female speaking roles

Over at Feministe, a couple days ago Jill posted (without comment) part of an article from the LA Times, which says that despite making up half the population, only 29.9% of movie speaking roles are (at least in the top 100 grossing films of 2007). The reason was pretty obvious to me: most of the bad guys in movies are men. While the good guys usually consist of men and women, most villains are male, almost all of their lieutenants are male, and virtually every mook/guard/redshirt is male.

Avatar is an example of this. While there were male and female protagonists, all of the antagonists at every level were male.

JJ Abram's Star Trek is another example. In Starfleet (the good guys), there were both men and women present - on the USS Kelvin, at Starfleet Academy, and on the USS Enterprise. Indeed, it looked like the producers and casting directors had gone out of their way to make the crews seem half-male, half-female.

The villainous Romulans, in contrast, were all male. Lucia Rijker (known for playing a boxer in Million Dollar Baby was supposed to play a female Romulan, but I didn't see her. Anyways, there was no way it could have been accidental that the good guys were mixed male-female and the bad guys all male.

Now, if the good guys are male and female and the bad guys are male, it follows that there will be more men with speaking roles than women. Of course, if films started showing more "bad girls," feminists would probably complain that the film industry is "promoting violence against women."