themuse.jezebel.com: Sergeant Buzzkill here, reporting for duty: Hollywood's tiny share of female directors has not grown in the last 17 years. In fact, it's dropped.
Variety reports on a study out of San Diego State University's Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. Researchers crunched the numbers to see how many of the industry's top 250 grossing films were directed by women, and found a measly 7 percent.
2 comments:
I find this very discouraging. As we know here at Carnegie Mellon, there are many women interested in, passionate about and talented in directing. So the disparity doesn't make sense. It isn't like there are fewer women than men, or as if women just didn't like movies. Actually, women account for 70% of movie watchers world wide. It's just common sense that when people like something, there are going to be some people who want to create it. Thus I am left with a few inevitable conclusions. First, Hollywood, and directing and other positions of power especially, is a boys club. People hire people that they see themselves in, so the same people are being hired again and again, leaving women out. The second, in response to the allegation in the comments that women don't want to be directors, is that women are unconsciously conditioned from childhood not to be in charge. There are plenty of passionate talented women who would make amazing directors, but they are dissuaded from the profession by years of subtle, and sometimes blatant discouragement. To fix this problem in hollywood, and let our most prolific art form actually portray the point of view of HALF of our population, we need to start from the ground up.
Despite the idea that society has made leaps and bounds in the form of progression towards equality for women, articles like this put into perspective how much farther the world as a whole must travel until a true equilibrium has been reached between sexes. Society has always reacted uncomfortably to the idea of strong women being in control, which may be the exact reason that there has been a decrease in the percentage of women directing films. Giving a female the title of “director” gives her the opportunity to be the boss of all genders, and it is clear that the world has yet to reach a point in which they are entirely comfortable with the idea of women being able to impose their ideas upon members of the opposite sex.
It is so very important that we work towards finding a solution to this problem in the near future, for if women continue along the same path they have been traveling upon in recent years, the idea of female directors won’t be much of an idea at all in a few years’ time. Now is the time for society to see more of the Sophia Coppola’s and Kathryn Bigelow’s of the world- it is time for society to accept the idea that women can and will play a man’s game without the world preventing them from doing so out of the fear that one day, they might just win.
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