By now, you’re probably familiar with the numbers regarding women on screen. They’re not pretty.
But how do women fare behind the scenes?
According to a report published by Stephen Follows on the gender breakdown of film crews from the 100 highest grossing films at the US box office between 1994 and 2013, women are also doing pretty dismally there too.
Follows, a writer and producer from the UK, also runs a blog that explores different data within the film industry. His study, Gender Within Film Crews, found stats that would, unfortunately, probably surprise no one, and the conclusions, Follows noted, would make it pretty hard for anyone to argue that Hollywood doesn’t actually have a problem with gender equality.
Of a total of 2,000 films that were included in the study, Follows found that just 22.6% of all crew members were female. And the number of women working as crew members has actually been going backwards over the past 20 years.
In 2013 alone, just 21.8% of women made up the film crews of the 100 highest grossing films, a number that is lower than the average of the past 20 years.
Split by industry, the gender gaps are significant, particularly within technical fields. Camera and electrical department were made up of just 5% of women and other fields like cinematography and editing were also made up of an alarmingly small number of women.
The departments that do have a female majority include costume and make up, often perceived as feminine roles. Casting departments were also majority female, but other creative departments fared much worse.
There are fewer female writers, editors, directors and film producers than there have been in the past 20 years, with women making up just 2% of the directors of the highest grossing films in 2013. And while the number of cinematographers has risen from 0% in 1994, the number still sits at just under 2%, which doesn’t look a lot like progress.
The largest department in feature films, the visual department, was comprised of just 17.5% of females, while music had 16%.
And the film to make up the highest concentration of female crew, according to what Follows has dubbed the Fey-Seagal Scale? Mean Girls.
Released in 2004, the Tina Fey film was mostly an all-female driven film, made up of 42% of women. But one decade later it still holds the record on embracing gender equality, meaning Hollywood has been going backwards in the past ten years.
The other films with a larger presence of women in the crew include; Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005), Honey (2003) and Miss Congeniality (2000) — all released over nine years ago.
Meanwhile, the films with the lowest percentage of women in the crew included Steven Seagal’s On Deadly Ground and Robots, which both had 10% of female crew.
The lack of opportunities for women to obtain paid work in the industry definitely represents a problem, not just for the industry, but for audiences too. Fellows found that 42% of films that were most popular with women were written by women, and with a heavily dominated male crew, female representation on-screen is still clouded by male interpretations.
The biggest problem for women who are missing from these key roles is that we will continue to see a gender inertia as long as the industry is dominated by males and we’re unlikely to see much change without other women in the industry to mentor and hire more women.
Shutting women out of equal opportunities? None for your Hollywood.
Check out the full study here.