Women are officially three times more likely to get naked in a Hollywood film than men

The annual Report on the Status of Women and Girls in California has further highlighted the troubling gender disparity in mainstream American cinema

Lois Lane (Amy Adams) and Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Warner Bros)

A study has revealed women are nearly three times more likely than men to appear either nude, or partially nude, in Hollywood cinema.

The annual Report on the Status of Women and Girls in California, undertaken by Mount Saint Mary's University in Los Angeles, found that 26% of female characters in the top 100 films at the US box office in 2014 were shown in a state of undress, as opposed to only 9% of male characters.

It's a troubling state recently highlighted by Twitter user Ross Putman, who began tweeting out examples of female character descriptors from Hollywood scripts in an effort to highlight the industry's prevasive objectification of women.

Such a statistic only further plays into the troubling gender disparity in onscreen representation; with just 12% of those films featuring a lead female character, and only 23% of characters shown in employment being women, though they make up 46% of the US workforce.

However, the study did reveal an improvement in women working behind the camera, though they still constitute only 17% of indivdiuals emplyed on the top 250 films; furthermore, fewer that one in five had occupied a major position as director, writer, or producer in a big-budgeted film over the past 15 years. Though the study did point out that when women occupy these key behind-the-scenes roles, the number of additional women both behind the scenes and on screen increases.

Also examined was the diversity in women of colour on screen, who remained vastly underpresented in both TV and film; with over 74% of female human characters being white. Black women represented less than 11%, with Asian and Latin women making up only 4%; conversely, Latinos make up 39% of the population of California.