http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/24/idUS215708133320120124/
In summary:
- The percentage of women directors has declined since 1998 while the percentages of women writers and producers have increased slightly. The percentage of women executive producers, editors and cinematographers have remained the same.
- 94 percent of the top films of 2011 were directed by men.
- Women made up 14 percent of writers in the top films.
- 77 percent of the major films of 2011 had no female writers.
- Women made up 25 percent of all producers on the top 250 films of 2011.
- Women made up 20 percent of editors in the biggest films of 2011, but 76 percent of those films had no female editors.
- There were fewer female cinematographers than directors on the top films of 2011: only 4 percent of cinematographers were women.
- Women were most likely to work in documentaries, dramas and comedies and least likely to work in horror, action and animated films.
Those are some fairly shocking statistics to take in there!
ReplyDeleteI would say that on one hand the film industry is sexist and that the men dominate in every aspect.
But maybe the industry isn't sexist it's just the way it is? I wouldn't rate a film on the gender of the director, i would rate the film on how well made the film was.
Do you think the industry is doing this intentionally or is it just being labelled sexist because of the men to women ratio?
What's your opinion on this?
"But maybe the industry isn't sexist it's just the way it is?". Well it obviously *is* the way it is! And the way it is is sexist.
ReplyDeleteDo I think that producers deliberately choose not to employ women when they are putting together their production teams? Maybe not consciously every time, but when the system is so dominated by men it is unsurprising that the first directorial and screen writer names which spring to mind for producers are usually male. And most producers are themselves men, so unless there is some deliberate remedial action taken, the situation will simply perpetuate.
Let's be fair: historically, most professions have been dominated by men but over the past 60 or so years of moving towards gender equality, lots of careers have become more accessible to women (although it is debatable as to the extent of gender equality in most jobs, even now). I guess that most people would accept that the situation in much of the 20th century was pretty shameful, but thanks to wave after wave of protests and pressure for change (Suffragettes, for example, through to second wave feminism and the Women's Liberation movement in the late 60s onwards) some balancing of these inequalities has occured. What is shocking about the new stats regarding Hollywood is that things do not seem to be progressing at all in the film industry - in fact they are going backwards.
You say "I wouldn't rate a film on the gender of the director, I would rate the film on how well made the film was". This is all well and good, but given that - to all intents and purposes - women do not make films, how can you be so sure? Nearly every film you have seen and "rated" was directed by a man!
ReplyDeleteI suspect - but I don't really know - that there may be deliberate anti-female bias in the industry anyway. We've talked a lot about how the structures of Hollywood narratives are geared towards telling male stories. The Bechdel test - crude though it is - is very revealing there. And we have anecdotal evidence - from Miranda July, for one, who struggled for years to get funding to tell her clearly "female" story "Me and You and Everyone We Know" - that there isn't a glass ceiling in Hollywood so much as a glass door at the gates which won't even let women in, let alone allow them to progress up the career ladder.
My guess is that this is simply a way of maintaining a very profitable status quo. Hollywood is lousy at taking chances and risking loss of profit. Safe re-makes of successful old or foreign movies, franchise series which guarantee lucrative though diminishing returns and repetitive, unadventurous genre pieces dominate programming at multiplexes across the world. Giving women a chance to see what they could do would be too much of a risk. If it ain't broke, don't ask a woman to fix it.
It is probably impossible to find hard facts to support this idea of "deliberate sexism", but the evidence of Hollywood output and the recently publish statistics do seem very compelling. What is clear, though, is that there is systematic institutional sexism in the industry. There must be, otherwise a) women would have progressed in the directing/writing professions in line with other professions in the world outside Hollywood (look, say, at the pitiful number of female novelists during the rise of the novel in the late 18th/early 19th century and the way women dominate the prose fiction market now - although not the "serious" fiction market so much... but that's a debate for another time) and b)the majority of Hollywood output would not continue to peddle predominantly male stories.
In light of all this, David Cameron's recent plea to the British film industry to make more "commercially viable" films must be seen as an attempt to stop British film (which, like many lower budget national film industries, DOES offer women access to the film making process) from taking the kind of risks which can allow revolutionary change within the film making world. He would prefer, he says, more films like "The King's Speech" to be made: because it tells a predominantly male, elitist tale which reinforces ideas of both patriarchy and social class which go to the heart of the Tory ideal? Or because it is precisely those kinds of films which seem to make the most money for the industry and country? Ideology, institution and economics seem completely bound up together. As if we needed proof.