Women make up 18 per cent of editors, 11 per cent of writers, and just 2 to 4 per cent of directors on successful films, that is, the films that studios spend their money on promoting. In fact, fewer women are directing now than a decade ago.
When Ava DuVernay, the director of Selma, was in talks to direct a Marvel superhero blockbuster, her gender made headline news. More often, women who get a shot at directing already have the superstar clout of Hollywood royalty like Sophia Coppola or are successful actresses like Angelina Jolie. Only one female director has won a best director Oscar—Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker in 2010—and no other woman has been nominated since.
Women are particularly shut out of directing, which is a job where you call the shots. And there is a lot of unconscious bias and outright stereotyping at play.
‘Unfortunately this particular sector is actually lagging behind by many measures,’ she says.
‘If you look at the big studio films that are released ... last year’s big studio releases, women were directing less than 2 per cent of those movies. That’s a statistic that’s much worse than you find in other sectors in parts of corporate America.
‘By some accounts even women in the military, a real all-male bastion for so many years, are having more opportunities.
‘Women are particularly shut out of directing, which is a job where you call the shots. There is a lot of unconscious bias and outright stereotyping at play.’
An anonymous open blog, Shit People Say To Women Directors, started in April, and casts some light on those stereotypes. It’s hard to believe the comments come from an industry that prides itself on its liberal politics.
Now the ACLU has decided that Hollywood needs to pull its socks up. The group has asked state and federal employment agencies to investigate the hiring practices of major studios, networks and talent agencies on the charge of gender discrimination against female directors.
LA-based director Maria Giese—a director and activist who writes about Hollywood’s sexism on her blog, Women Directors in Hollywood—says it is much easier for women to get jobs in lower-paid parts of the film industry.
‘It’s a great deal easier for women to get directing jobs in documentaries. I think women make up about 45 to 50 per cent of documentary film directors and [about] 20 to 25 per cent of indie films,’ she says.
‘But when you get into the studio system, which is where money gets paid out, the numbers drop down to anything between below 2 per cent to around 4.5 per cent.’
Even women who win prizes for their films have to battle to get hired again. Ms Migdal cites a study from the Sundance Institute and Women in Film examining distribution deals and results for films coming out of Sundance over a 12 year period.
‘[It showed] women compete in high numbers in film festivals and their films do very well there,’ she says.
‘However, after they’ve made their first films, even when those films win awards, that’s when the barriers begin, because women whose films win awards and prizes at film festivals still are not offered the big studio opportunities or the opportunities to break into television directing.’
There is a precedent for the ACLU’s action. Thirty-five years ago, six female directors risked their careers to take on the studios over hiring practices. Their class action lawsuit produced some results—over the following 10 years the number of female directors in Hollywood increased from 0.5 per cent to 16 per cent in 1995.
Lynne Littman, one of the ‘original six’, says that since that time, things had gone backwards. She says that because women and minorities were lumped together under diversity guidelines, most studios would hire a black male director to fulfil their quota.
‘The studios and the guild signatories began to hire ethnic minority males and fulfil their obligations to the agreements and not hire women at all,’ Maria Giese says.
‘The numbers [of women] from 1995 to 2014 actually went down, while the number of ethnic minority males has gone up remarkably.’
Ariela Migdal agrees the situation for women in film has gone backwards.
‘When you look at the gaps in the budgets of the films that are being given to men to direct, and the independent film sector to which women directors have essentially been relegated—you can finance an $8 million film and a studio will not give you a $100 million international blockbuster tentpole film to direct—it’s a pretty extreme problem,’ she says.
‘We think that the civil rights agencies should take it up again.’
She thinks the ACLU's campaign has touched a nerve as Hollywood comes to terms with a culture of sexism that often sees actresses cast in stereotypical roles and few female protagonists appearing on screen.
‘People are now starting to break down the statistics in different ways and figure out whether these things change when you have a woman director,’ she says.
‘Every day a new study comes out. I saw one about the gap in the ages between the leading men and the leading women. Maggie Gyllenhaal recently complained because she was told that at 37 she was far too old to play the love interest of a male actor in his fifties. Women are starting to say this is ridiculous.’
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