On-Screen Inertia: Persistent Racial and Gender Disparities in Hollywood Film (1900-2024)
Hollywood has diversified its casts. Whether this has translated into structural change in how those actors are positioned within narratives remains largely unexamined. Drawing on 76,815 U.S. English-language films (1900-2024) and over 3.1 million cast and crew entries, we move beyond headcounts to examine long-term inclusion trends through network centrality, occupational stereotypes, crew-to-cast diversity pathways, and financial outcomes. We find evidence of what we term on-screen inertia. While the raw inclusion of women and racial minorities has increased modestly, White actors have become more overrepresented relative to the U.S. Census in recent decades, not less. Within the visibility layer, women face a consistent longevity penalty with significantly shorter careers than men, and visual depictions framing men as dominant and women as sensual have remained stable since the 1950s. Structurally, White actors retain disproportionate network centrality; women achieve parity in centrality and lead billing yet cluster in secondary co-lead roles; and occupational stereotypes anchoring racial and gender groups to specific labor categories persist largely unchanged across the pre- and post-2000 periods. Crew diversity associates with cast inclusion only along matching demographic lines (i.e., racial with racial, gender with gender) and does not extend to narrative centrality, revealing a structural ceiling on hiring-based interventions. Critically, we find no consistent market penalty for diversity across decades of box office returns and audience ratings, eliminating the primary rationalization for these practices. Together, these findings demonstrate that Hollywood's representational inequalities are not a rational market response, but are an institutionally sustained choice.