| Abstract | This paper is an examination of female depictions within films specifically produced about the finance industry. The overall purpose of the study is to understand how and why women are misrepresented within a specific category of film. The movies studied in this thesis include The Boiler Room (Younger, 2000), The Last Days of Lehman Brothers (Samuels, 2009), Inside Job (Ferguson, 2010), Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Stone, 2010), Margin Call (Chandor, 2011), Too Big to Fail (Hanson, 2011), Arbitrage (Jarecki, 2012), The Wolf of Wall Street (Scorsese, 2013), The Big Short (McKay, 2015), and Wizard of Lies (Levinson, 2017). After compiling and analyzing data on the roles played by women in movies about finance, the results of the study concluded that women are underrepresented in Wall Street films compared to actual female participation in the industry. Rather than roles of financial analysts, women in Wall Street films are cast predominately as strippers, spouses, and secretaries. Data collected in this study suggests that there are more female analysts working within Wall Street banks than exampled by Hollywood. Further, the undesirable images portrayed onto women in finance themed films likely has an adverse effect on young women when evaluating occupation possibilities as supported by prior research. |
