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Think Geena Davis and chances are you think Thelma and Louise, or Stuart Little, or A League of Their Own, or countless other Hollywood productions she's been a part of for the past few decades.
None of those rank as her most important work.
It's being done behind the scenes.
As the founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media she's been pressuring Hollywood to get real — making moves towards 50 per cent of the population filling 50 per cent of on-screen roles.
"It's been shown that the more hours of TV a girl watches, the fewer options she thinks she has in life," Davis told 7.30.
"The more a boy watches, the more his self-esteem goes up, but also the more sexist his views become."
The Oscar-winner wants the entertainment industry to recognise the importance of gender balance in TV shows and films aimed at children 11 and under.
"My theory is, and a lot of researchers' theory is, that we judge our value by how we are reflected in popular culture," she said.
"You see yourself or lots of people like you, you think, 'Oh I'm important.' But when you're not there or there's very few people who look like you, even though women are half of the population or more than half — there's very, very few women there — girls internalise the message, unconsciously, that they're not as valuable as boys.
"And boys internalise the same message that they're more important than girls, that their stories are more important, their point of view is more important."
'We can't keep teaching kids to have unconscious gender bias'
The United States, she points out, makes 80 per cent of the media consumed worldwide.
"We are responsible in many ways for exporting a not-very-good image of women around the world."
When Davis started meeting with Hollywood executives to discuss the issue, they genuinely thought gender disparity on screen was no longer a problem. Their anecdotal 'evidence' was put through the ringer when she provided real data funded by her institute.
In a study looking for gender balance in the top grossing films from 11 countries, Australia, the US and France all came in with 0 per cent. In what might surprise many, the top ranking countries were China, with 30 per cent of their films achieving a gender balance, and Korea came in with 20 per cent.
"Nobody knew what was going on," she said.
"Now that they do, from all the meetings I've had, all the consultations we have, it's something they want to change, they know how to change it, and it's very, very doable. I think we'll see tremendous progress there relatively soon.
"We can't keep teaching kids to have unconscious gender bias."
Making stories through the female gaze
She may have played the US president in TV show Commander in Chief, but Davis said it was Thelma and Louise that got her thinking about making a real difference, leaving a legacy that went beyond her own performances.
"Thelma and Louise was more important in terms of an awakening for me. It launched me in a direction of wanting to help empower women.
"Nearly everything is made through the male gaze. A very disturbing study that came out last year showed girls as young as six years old have started to view themselves through the male gaze. They have self-sexualised as young as six. That's really an indictment of us and just a shame.
"There's no reason they shouldn't be seeing half of their entertainment through the female gaze, through a variety of different lenses."
With 94 per cent of Hollywood CEOs being white males, a dramatic on-screen shift requires a massive buy-in from the men, one that Davis said is happening. Just not fast enough.
Topics: media, film, television, community-and-society, women, sydney-2000
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