CMU School of Drama


Friday, January 13, 2017

Female Director Numbers Drop, Despite Hollywood Diversity Debate

Variety: Despite all the editorials and the speeches and the handwringing, things aren’t getting better for women in Hollywood. They’re getting worse.

Women comprised just 7 percent of all directors working on the 250 highest-grossing domestic releases in 2016, a decline of two percentage points from the level achieved in 2015 and in 1998, according to a new report from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.

3 comments:

Kamal Budha said...

साहित्यकार तथा पत्रकार दिया चन्द को यो लभ स्टोरी अबस्य पढ्नुहोला
http://www.imandarmedia.com/2017/01/diya-chand.html

Ali Whyte said...

I think government intervention is a very big step, and not one I necessarily think we should be taking at the moment. I am also surprised by this overall decline with all of the media talking about women's representation in the film industry, but I think it is still to early for forced intervention, as that could lead to resentment and hostility towards female employees which would end up being a step backward. One of the things about this article that I found most revealing about the current state of women in film was the mention of the increase in composer and supervising sound editor positions, which were 3 percent and 8 percent respectively, in order to lighten the tone and offer some reprise. But these numbers still aren't good. If the new number is 3 percent, and there was an increase, that means hardly any female composers existed at all before this year, and 3 percent is still not even close to what that number probably should be.

Emily Lawrence said...

This was a very disappointing article to read, especially since I am a female in the industry. While I do not think that the attention this issue is important, I do think that by making a bigger deal about the amount of women in the industry it could end up slowing down progress. It is a major issue that needs to be solved and there is no excuse not to have equality, but people who do not want to see equality can easily prevent women from working if they see that people are trying harder than ever to change things. There is a fine line between fighting for something to change but then fighting for it so hard that people begin to become fearful and revert to unnecessary ways. I recently saw a post about the directors that Jennifer Lawrence has worked with and how only one of them was a woman, and that was one of the most disappointing things I have seen this year. It is sad that the percent of women working in the industry is so drastically different from the male percentage, but this is something that will take time. As long as articles like this one continue to be posted, hopefully people will begin to realize that gender is not a thing that should decide who gets the job.