Inclusion has been one of the hottest topics for the film world in 2018, but it is hard to say if we are anywhere near an equal playing field for women and minorities in all aspects of film. While we have seen women and minorities in increasingly more and better roles there is still a shortage of female writers and directors creating films that are being seen by the masses. To address this shortage, I have decided to analyze film crews in the ten highest grossing films (indie and non-indie) of 2017. Using this data, I wanted to find out where women stand in the unseen positions of filmmaking.
The dataset included 20 films in total and I chose the following positions to analyze: Directors, Writers, Producers, Musicians, Cinematographers, Editors, Set Designers, Production Designers, Casting, and Costuming. To gather the data, I used year end lists of the top grossing films from IndieWire.com and IMDB.com. I then decided to limit the data to the first ten positions that were listed, excluding the cast. Once I had the crew members names and positions I used both IMDB.com and Wikipedia to determine the gender of each person to the best of my ability. After all of the data was gathered and analyzed I built some graphs and charts to help better visualize the numbers that I found. During the data analysis it was extremely apparent that women still have a long way to go in their quest to become equally represented in film crews. The data produced some interesting patterns — some positions were almost exclusively filled by women and a few positions had no women represented.
Mapping the data into charts revealed that women made up 27% of the crew in indie films, and 22% in standard feature films (see fig. 1).
I was surprised to find so few women were working as film crew members. Concerned that my numbers were not correct in some way, I did some more research and came across an article in The Guardian from 2014. The article stated that 75% of blockbuster film crews were male, and things were not getting better over time but worse: “rather than improving over time, the number of women working with blockbuster film crews in 2013 actually declined from previous years, to an average of just 21.8%” (Ellis-Petersen). Analyzing data from five years later is still yielding similar results, but the general public has the impression that Hollywood is working diligently to solve the issues of gender disparity, yet when we look at the gender breakdown the crews are still completely dominated by men (see fig. 2).
Considering the amount of dialogue surrounding this issue it would seem that years later the numbers would start to change and show more women occupying the positions typically reserved for men, yet here we are with numbers that have not seemed to budge since 2013, and if they have changed it’s only been for the worse.
So where do the women fit in among film crews? In 2018, it appears they are still occupying positions that have been considered traditionally feminine. Out of the ten roles that were analyzed, casting, costuming, and set design were the only three in which women outnumbered the men. The data that I gathered does not lend any reasoning as to why women are not occupying the more influential and creative roles such as director, writer, cinematographer, but we have to believe there are plenty of women directors, writers, etc. that are just not getting the chances that they deserve. We can speculate however that the reason we are not seeing women in these positions could be due to sexist hiring practices, lack of confidence, or the gender pay gap.
While the women dominated the casting, costuming, and set design roles there were two positions that women were not represented at all in both sets of data: Music and Cinematography (see fig. 3).
In the figure above, it is quite clear that all of the most creative roles in filmmaking are dominated by men currently. There were only two female directors in the combined data, and there are certainly plenty of women directing films. So why aren’t their films being distributed to the masses? A 2015 article from Fortune offers an explanation: “for many female film directors, a career can begin — and end — with the making of short films, and that when a woman director moves into a position of making narrative features or feature films, the financing isn’t there, but the institutional biases are” (Anderson). Based on the study that Anderson references and the data collected for this project it appears that for women being talented is not enough in the film industry. Women must also jump over the hurdles of the institutional biases in order to find success, while potentially less talented men are handed opportunities without question.
Of all the films that were researched Lady Bird was the outlier in terms of gender equality in the crew. The film was completely equal based on the positions that I used in this study (see fig. 4).
We can ponder reasons for Lady Bird’s equality in gender crew — one reason could be that the principal creative roles (writer and director) in the film were occupied by a woman (Greta Gerwig). Perhaps, if a woman is directing and writing a film she feels more of a responsibility to cultivate an equal crew. This is a promising statistic, and something to reference again once we see an insurgence of female creators occupying the roles of director and writer.
While the results of this study were not surprising in any way it did reveal that there is still substantial gender bias in the film industry. While indie films had slightly higher percentage of women working in film crews there is still an enormous disparity between men and women in film. Hopefully researchers will continue to study this type of data and shed light to the inconsistency of gender equality in films. The more awareness and discussion that surrounds the issue will hopefully amplify women and provide for more opportunities for them in all aspects of film in the years to come.
Works Cited
Anderson, J. (2015, October 6). Study shows how women directors get blocked in Hollywood. Retrieved from fortune.com: http://fortune.com/2015/10/06/women-directors-hollywood/
Ellis-Petersen, H. (2014, July 22). Gender bias in the film industry: 75% of blockbuster crews are male. The Guardian. Retrieved March 20, 2018, from The Guardian.
Erbland, K. (2018, January 2). The 20 Highest Grossing Indies of 2017 (Final List). Retrieved from indiewire.com: http://www.indiewire.com/2017/06/highest-grossing-indie-films-2017-1201764229/
Top-US-Grossing Feature Films Released 2017–01–01 to 2017–12–31. (2018, January 2). Retrieved from IMDB.com: http://www.imdb.com/search/title?year=2017,2017&title_type=feature&sort=boxoffice_gross_us,desc
