Working Girls

This chart, by Molly Fitzpatrick for Fusion, has been doing the rounds.

It's "what job did Oscar winning actresses portray?", and the article it's taken from can be found here.  It obviously raises questions about how Hollywood portrays women, given that the best job a woman can play onscreen is apparently "wife".  

As usual, this caused a chain reaction that lead me to James Bond, and specifically Bond Girls, and so I decided to do a bit of number crunching of my own.  I fed the numbers into the new Kutsov computer in an attempt to discover what professions have been held by the women in Bond films.  Here's the result:

  

I've used the same categories as the Oscar chart, for simplicity's sake.  Unsurprisingly, "military" - which I've used to include "spy" - comes out top, with 15, or 26%.  Equally unsurprisingly, "criminal" - all those Bad Girls - comes second with 9, or 16%.  Third place, however, goes to "scientist".  "Girlfriend" is fourth with five: you could include the two wives and the one widow to make a single category of eight.  (Interesting point: of all those women, only one, Lisl, is actually portrayed as being happy).

There are some overlaps between categories: Elektra and Octopussy are both entrepreneurs and criminals, but I've put them in the former category as they are businesswomen first, lawbreakers second.  Similarly, the overqualified Holly Goodhead - an astrophysicist, astronaut and CIA agent - had to go somewhere, so I went with her doctorate and put her in Scientist.  "Other" goes to three women - Sylvia, Tilly and Nancy - whose professions are never actually mentioned (it's implied Sylvia is some kind of socialite, but I couldn't be sure).

Given Bond women's reputation as somewhat "loose", it's interesting to note there's only actually been one prostitute in the series, Plenty O'Toole, and let's face it, she's a very high-class hooker.  

Please note: I am shit at charts.

What does it all mean?  Nothing, of course; a Bond Girl's profession is often irrelevent, especially in the early years of the films, and her ultimate purpose is to look pretty then have sex with 007.  I just found it interesting that the categories at the very top of the Oscar chart (wife, entertainer, blue collar worker) are scrabbling around the bottom of the chart in Bond movies.  

My classifications for Bond Girl jobs can be seen below.