Topic: Women in the Film Industry
Research Question: how can women become better represented in Television and film?
France, L.R. (2017). Female Directors Becoming Rarer in Hollywood. CNN. Cable News Network. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/12/ entertainment/women-directors-hollywood/.
Lisa France’s article focuses on the noticeable drop in numbers of female directors
working in Hollywood as of January 2017. She skims the surface of this blatant gender
inequality being observed within the Hollywood system and cites supporting data from
an extensive study of women behind the camera in Hollywood which was released by
San Diego State recently. She also acknowledges an unchanging “boys club”
environment that festers within the industry and the tendency for old, white, male
directors to take young, white, male directors under their wing, leaving women directors to fend for themselves. One of the problems that arises from this favoritism of white male directors is the circumstance in which these men are given huge budget films sometimes on their first or second time directing, whereas women are hardly ever
considered to be on the short list.
8/7/17 5:48 PM
A senior writer for CNN’s Money Media, Lisa France could be considered an
experienced journalist for the CNN news team. What gives her article the most
credibility, however, are hyperlinks to the journal article released by San Diego State
on gender inequality in the film industry titled The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind-the-
Scenes Employment of Women on the Top 100, 250, and 500 Films of 2016. Although
the article itself is not the most informative, it contains links to other, much more
knowledgeable sources on the material.
Although this article addresses the lack of female directors in Hollywood, it would not
alone be very useful for my research paper because it is comprised mostly of quotes
from industry insiders on their take on the situation and summarizations of data
published in scholarly articles. This article is, however, useful in that it led me to more
credible sources that were used by France to write her article.
Lauzen, M. M. (2016). The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind-the-Scenes Employment of Women on the Top 100, 250, and 500 Films of 2016. Women In Tv/Film. Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, San Diego State University. Retrieved from http:// womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2017/01/2016_Celluloid_Ceiling_Report.pdf.
Recording 19 years’ worth of female employment in the film industry, Martha Lauzen’s
research is presented in three different categories which break down her findings into
percentages of women working in different jobs behind the scenes on film sets and how
female employment in 2016 compares to employment in the past 18 years. Lauzen
found that on the 250 top domestic grossing films between the years 2015 and 2016 the
percentage of women directors, producers, executive producers, editors, and
cinematographers declined. The only position that slightly increased was female writers.
These percentages are also compared to statistics of the same jobs held by women in
1998 and Lauzen reported that the percentage of directors, editors, and executive
producers declined from 1998 to 2016 while the percentage of writers and
producers stayed the same.
Lauzen is credible as an author of material on gender inequality in Hollywood
employment because she is recognized as an expert on both women employment on
camera and behind the camera. She is a professor at San Diego State University and the
executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. The
information she presents in this research publication is reliable because it reports on
workplace trends of hiring women in different positions on a film set over the course of
19 years, so the data she has collected is extensive and representative of a large portion
of film history.
This source will be useful to me as a way of establishing the fact of female
underrepresentation in Hollywood because a majority of the data is presented as
percentages of women in specific jobs on films each year for 19 years. She includes
graphs of these trends that I may include in my paper. I will use the article a reliable
reference point for the number of women involved behind the scenes on films for nearly
two decades, which will strengthen my argument that more needs to done to correct this
inequity.
Molina-Guzmán, I. (2016). #OscarsSoWhite: How Stuart Hall Explains Why Nothing Changes in Hollywood and Everything Is Changing. Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol 33, No 5. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. Retrieved from http://nca.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15295036.2016.1227864 scroll=top&needAccess=true. 23 Apr. 2017.
Molina-Guzmán’s scholarly article reflects on the lack of diversity within
Hollywood’s internal structure and why racial and gender discrimination has been
able to persist within the industry for so long, seemingly uncontested. This piece
builds on Stuart Hall’s theories of culture, representation, ideology, and hegemony
and how they can be used to explain why the Hollywood industry has hardly been
challenged on their significant lack of employed minorities working on film and
television sets. A reoccurring explanation throughout the article for this phenomenon is
the observation that Hollywood and television are increasing representation of
minorities onscreen, which satisfies audiences but does not put pressure on film and
television production sets/crews to attain the same level of diversity behind the
scenes.
Molina-Guzmán focuses the article mostly around racial discrimination of minorities
within the Hollywood system while also touching on gender because both in the film
industry are not given equal opportunities to white men. This text is a good starting point for understanding the structure of the Hollywood system and how it is built
around historical prejudices, resulting in hegemony of white men over others within the
industry. This rigid structure is a major reason for racial discrimination and sexism.
The section Hollywood Exceptionalism Frame will be best suited to my paper on the
lack of female involvement on film sets because it discusses how film is much farther
behind than television in regards to diversity of production crews. This part of the
article presents the statistic that between 2013 and 2014, 82.4 percent of films
released were directed by white men and only 1.3 percent of the films released were
directed by ethnic and racial minority women.
Smith, S. L., Choueiti, M. Scofield, E. & Pieper, K. (2014). Gender Inequality in Popular Films: Examining On-Screen Portrayals and Behind-the-Scenes Employment Patterns in Motion Pictures Released between 2007-2012. Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, University of Southern California, 2014. Retrieved from http://annenberg.usc.edu/sites/default/files/MDSCI_Gender_Inequality_in_600_films
Stacy Smith and co-authors wrote this paper about the gender inequality they
discovered from their research over the span of five years (2007-2013) from the 100
top grossing films released each of those years. One situation they found was that the
gender of the content creator, whether it be the director or screen writer, was correlated to how girls and women were represented on screen. Smith reported that over the five-year span, films directed or written by women were far less likely to depict girls or women in a sexualized manner such as wearing alluring, revealing clothes or being shown partially nude. In her conclusion she suggests that ideally this problem could be solved by hiring more women on film sets thereby influencing the representation of women on screen. In reality there has been little to no change in nearly five years so the battle for equality continues.
As noted below in the annotation for the TED Talk, Smith is highly qualified and
knowledgeable in her field of expertise. This article is credible and reliable because it
reports on research that was conducted over the course of 5 years. This strengthens
claims of unequal work trends and treatment of women in the film industry because
data collected from several years showing little to no change in women employment
supports the main argument of gender inequality.
This source presents insight into the issue of content creator gender for a research paper focusing on trends of female employment in Hollywood. It will be important to
understand how a film being directed by a man versus a woman can negatively impact
the way in which female characters are depicted onscreen. Pointing out this correlation
will help me to engage my audience and demonstrate to them why this topic is worthy
of their attention.
Smith, S. L. (2017). “The Data behind Hollywood’s Sexism.” TedTalksWomen. YouTube, Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kkRkhAXZGg.
Stacy Smith’s talk at TEDWomen in October 2016 was given with the purpose of
informing an audience of the problematic social issue of gender inequality and sexism
in the film industry. She introduces data she and her research team found after
conducting an 8-year-long study of the top 100 grossing films released each year from
2007 to 2015. For every film, they recorded the total number of speaking characters,
the ratio of male to female characters, and gender of the directors. They discovered
that, in over 32,000 speaking roles in 800 films, only 1/3rd were female and that of
over 800 directors working on these films, 4.1% were women. Smith introduces this
data with the intention of lighting a fire in her audience (most of whom were women)
before launching into the second half of her talk which discusses how to take action so
these statistics may change in future years to be more representative of women in
Hollywood.
Smith has a PhD in Communication and is an associate professor at the University of
Southern California. Her areas of expertise include entertainment, gender studies, and
media portrayals, which gives credibility to the information she is presenting. The
goal of her talk is to inform people of a pressing social problem that is not being
perceived as one due to the industry it is associated with, Hollywood. This source
could be considered biased, however, because Smith only reports on the trends her
data shows and does not reference any other sources or studies that may contradict
her claims.
The data on female representation in the film industry, as well as Smith’s two suggested strategies for correcting the absence of women in movies and behind the camera, will be a helpful starting point for my paper, which will examine into why the Hollywood system has been relatively unchanging and historically less inclusive of women. Although not a source that is as credible as a scholarly article, the data Smith presents could be useful to me as a starting point for asking questions why there is a lack of female employees in Hollywood.
Sneider, J., and Doty, M. (2017). 20th Century Fox, Paramount Have No Female Directors Through 2018. TheWrap. Retrieved from http://www.thewrap.com/20thcentury-fox-paramount-have-no-female-directors-through-2018/
Jeff Sneider and Mariah Doty’s article deals with the upcoming number of female
directors attached to films set to be released over the next couple years. They break the
article up into different sections dedicated to specific film companies and their
upcoming films/directors. They found that films scheduled to be released up until 2018
from Paramount and Fox have no female directors attached to any of the movies. Many
of these movies have been in the pre-production pipelines for a couple years, before the
demand for gender inequality in the film industry became as prominent as it is now.
Only a couple of film companies have hired or are talking to some female directors to
be attached to upcoming projects, but even so Sneider and Doty argue that no real
significant change in gender equality will be seen in the film industry for a couple of
years since a majority of the movies released between now and 2018 will be directed by
men.
8/7/17 5:
The Wrap is a media news website that was founded and has been active since 2009. Its
founder, Sharon Waxman, originally worked as a correspondent for news sources such
as the New York Times and Washington Post. This source is credible as a news site
because it has won many awards for its investigative journalism, and was even named
the best online news site in 2012 and 2009. Being linked to Sharon Waxman also adds
credibility to the source, as she is an award-winning journalist and specializing in
entertainment media.
This source will be useful in demonstrating how women are currently being
underrepresented in the film industry. Many of the scholarly articles noted above look at data collected from the last several years and suggest a probable trend that is associated with such low numbers of women working on film sets. This article, however, looks at future films and how women are still not being considered for films scheduled to be released into 2018. This will help me to establish that this is a trend that my audience should continue to track into the near future.