The problem with Nancy Drew isn’t that it’s too female

Earlier this year US TV Network CBS ordered a pilot for a Nancy Drew reboot and viewers everywhere who had been fans of the independent teenage super sleuth geared themselves up to see her reimagined as an adult detective in New York. Unfortunately we’ll be waiting a little longer before we see her on our small screens as CBS decided to cancel the show, stating that “the pilot tested well but skewed too female for CBS’ schedule.” Mm, we see. Would this be the same CBS that recently pushed the female-fronted Supergirl show sideways over to the CW? The presence of women must be fairly detrimental to their ratings.

This news combined with ABC’s recent cancellation of Agent Peggy Carter and Iron Man 3 director Shane Black’s recent announcement that the film’s female villain was axed because women characters don’t sell as toys has left us wondering, just how low is the threshold before we consider something ‘too female’?

The situation brought to mind a study that was often brought up with regards to class participation when I was at university. In her book Learning to Lose: Sexism and Education Dale Spender researched talking in class by using audio and video to independently evaluate who talked the most in mixed-gender university classroom discussions. She found that no matter what the gender ratio of the students was, and whether the instructor was directly trying to draw out more female participation or not, men always talked more. The interesting thing is that when Spender asked students who they thought talked more in these discussions, women tended to be fairly accurate in assessing that they talked less; but men were more inclined to see the discussion as being “equal” or completely dominated by women even though they were talking less than 50% of the time. PBS even have a well-researched article that backs this up with more academic references.

It appears that when men are used to women talking for a small part of a discussion, any notable increase in their participation, even if it’s still less than their own, will feel uncomfortably like women are dominating them. So could the same be said for other areas of our lives? We continually state our awareness that there’s a shortage of women in many industries, be it gaming, as directors, in tech, on film and, yes, on prime time TV where a report for the UK found that women tended to be outnumbered 2 to 1.

This leads us to think that the problem with Nancy Drew wasn’t that it was ‘too female’, the problem is that everything else isn’t female enough. We’re so used to seeing woman not women; it’s fine when we’re the single antelope in the field that the lion can eat, but increase our numbers and suddenly we become more like the stampeding herd of wildebeest that took down Mufasa. Just look at how everyone lost their shit over the female Ghostbusters cast or how every female-fronted comedy film seems to have to be compared to Bridesmaids because good comedy films with a large female cast are something like the Highlander and we can only have one which all the others must work to behead.