Actress Geena Davis noticed a strange thing when she started watching children's TV shows and movies with her daughter Alizeh six years ago: There weren't that many girls and women on the screen.

So Davis tells the Sydney Morning Herald she founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2005. Institute researchers examined the 100 top-grossing G-rated films between 1990 to 2005.

"It was fascinating," Davis tells the paper. "Typically there are three male characters for every one female character. If it's a crowd scene, that ratio goes out to four or five males for every female. And 87 per cent of narrators are male."

Davis says children need to see more female characters in TV shows and movies. Otherwise, she tells the Morning Herald, they grow up thinking of women as invisible or unimportant.

Her institute's motto is: "Kids need to see entertainment where females are valued as much as males."

"There was this huge gender gap," Davis tells the Morning Herald. "It's partly because I had been in some movies that had resonated with women, so I'd had this heightened awareness of the paucity of parts for female actors. The stuff that we make for us. But I really didn't know that it was like this for kids."

Davis has appeared in such movies as "A League of Their Own" and "Thelma and Louise," winning an Oscar for her performance in "The Accidental Tourist" in 1988.

She addressed the United Nations in New York Monday for an event titled "Engaging Philanthropy to Promote Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment."

"I've been asked to give a closing keynote address," Davis tells the Morning Herald. "I'll talk about the depictions of women and girls in the media, and what we can do."

Contrary to popular belief, she adds, the situation is not improving. "There's no improvement," she tells the paper. "If I'm talking to somebody, they say, 'Yeah, it's getting better.' But they're not thinking of the whole movie length, of how many of other characters in the movie are female."

Researchers looked at that ratio in all ratings, not just G-rated films, Davis tells the Morning Herald. "Across the board, it's all the same," she tells the paper. "There's one female character for every three male characters, and it's been that way since 1947. Films like 'Sex and the City' are one-offs. They're not pointing to a trend."

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