2017 may have been a banner year for victims of sexual assault in Hollywood, but men still aren't hiring women in the film industry, according to Dr. Martha Lauzen's annual "Celluloid Ceiling" report.
The study, which Dr. Lauzen conducted for the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, analyzed 3,011 jobs among last year's 250 top-grossing films. It found that 88% of these films featured no female directors, 83% had no female writers, 80% had no women editors, and 96% had no female cinematographers. The striking disparity is perhaps most digestible when broken down into smaller numbers: Just 1% of films employed 10 or more women, while 70% of films employed 10 or more men.
Courtesy of UCLA Center for the Study of Women.
While still underemployed, women fared best as producers (24%), followed by executive producers (15%). The largest percentage of women, relative to men, worked in documentaries (30%), followed by comedies (23%), dramas (22%), sci-fi features (20%), animated features (19%), horror features (18%), and action features (13%).
Arguably, the study's most resonant finding is that film productions with female directors were significantly more likely to hire women in behind-the-scenes roles. For example, on female-directed films, writers were 68% female, compared with 8% for films directed by men.
The percentage of women hired in film jobs hasn't increased in the 20 years that Dr. Lauzen has conducted her study. In 1998, behind-the-scenes jobs were held by 17% of women.
