- Why is there a gender imbalance in the film industry?
I decided to reach out to some female film makers to
find out more.
This mini series comes to you in three parts.
This first part will be reasons why there might be
a gender imbalance, the second one is gonna be
anecdotes and experiences from these film makers
that they've had of sexism or just gender imbalance
in action, and the third part is gonna be what can be
done to start to make it better.
Just a quick note, this video is gonna include
the video testimonies submitted to me by female
film makers, as well as some of the ones that were
submitted to me written via email as read by volunteers.
Now according to articles online, some of the reasons
people within the industry give for a lack of women include
there aren't enough role models or mentors for women
with in the industry, women don't actually direct
their own films, women just tend to want to do smaller
more indie movies, women just can't direct action
or big block busters, I mean directing is pretty hard,
maybe women are just too smart to get into it.
We actually asked a women but she said no.
Women just choose to have families instead,
and of course our old favorite, overt sexism.
A lot of the women that I talked to also talked about
a type of historical baggage that's sort of still with us.
As recently as the 1960's, the majority of women
didn't have jobs, and if they did they were pretty
much renegaded to nurses, secretaries and teachers.
- Women weren't thought of as capable of handling anything
else except for domestic work and being able to keep
a tidy home and have dinner ready at a certain time.
- Now you might say that's decades ago, what does that
have to do with filmmaking today, but I think to ask that
is to kind of misunderstand the legacy that goes
through film making whether it's
cultural, social or historical.
In the 1970's for example we have this huge boom
in Hollywood studios, and we have profit ability,
we have productivity, we have creativity, and we have
these iconic names that start to be kind of
bubbling to the surface of Spielberg, Malik,
Lucas, for example.
These are still names that people know today.
These are the names that people say are sources
of inspiration for them, even 40, 50 years on.
- I think that men in the industry still think of
women as incapable.
- Hollywood has always really been a men's club
kind of industry, it's just been dominated by men
for so long, that that's just kind of the routine
in what's expected.
You expect these big, burly set men working on set.
- [Voiceover] Of course there has to be a huge societal
shift to change the norms.
It's not like someone said "women can wear trousers"
and the next day every girl was running around in slacks.
No, there had to be changes in fashion, changes in our
perception of femininity before the change could
take place.
- [Voiceover] In film, women are seen in the female
departments of costumes, make up, in the office,
there are a fair few in the art department,
and also a few pop up in the camera team now,
but on set there is always a stronger presence of men.
The majority of directors are men, and the majority
of executive producers are men.
The people at the top have been around in the industry
for a long time, and I feel that they are still very much
old fashioned and set in their ways.
- And these old fashioned attitudes and ideas,
this assumption that a woman is going to be
weak of inferior in some way, is something that so many
other female film makers I talked to came up against
in there experiences with work.
- I think that there's still this stigma that women
are weak physically, emotionally, and mentally.
You know, weaker than men, more emotional,
but it's really just not the truth and it's not
what I've seen in the field.
That there's still this idea, this attitude
that we are weaker, or that we are not as experienced,
not as skilled, need a little bit of help,
can't do it by ourselves.
It's just not the case.
- [Voiceover] It's both surprising and unsurprising
to me that there's still a gender bias in Hollywood.
I think a lot of it has to do with both tradition
of mainly male directors and producers, and our
tradition of one dimensional female characters.
- [Voiceover] Executives and producers think women can't
handle the stress of running a stress, when at the end
of the day, it's multi-tasking, delegating along with
dealing with a large bunch of kids.
Women have been doing this for years!
It's hard when you're in a leadership role, as many
men struggle to accept this and will go out of their
way to make sure you know about it too.
- There is something which I call "boys do, girls talk,"
and is something in the way in which young boys
and girls are encouraged to socialize and grow in childhood.
Boys are encouraged to do things; make a tree house,
learn an instrument, put together a toy car or an iPhone.
They're encouraged to learn skills and measure their worth
based on capability.
Girls are encouraged to shop, talk about boys,
socialize together, to form interpersonal relationships,
and measure their worth based on social relationships.
How popular they are, how many boys fancy them, etc.
It extends in a way into adulthood, when men are encouraged
to get together and do things, be it play sport
or shoot films.
Then women who are encouraged to consume, brunch,
drinks, clothes, and talk to one another.
When you enter into a practical, skills based working
environment, men have the whole catalogue background
of being encouraged to do things, and make things,
and value themselves based on those abilities.
- I know from working the industry myself that there
is just kind a an assumption that if you're male
you're gonna want to get into the tech stuff,
and if you're female you can do some stuff in the
production office or you could do hair and makeup
or costume, which all are amazing jobs, and it's not
that those aren't amazing jobs, it's just that there
are some girls that wanna get into sound and there
are some girls that love cameras.
I know I've really struggled to work with cameras,
because when I'm on a production, the boys always
get those jobs if we're shooting casting tapes
or wrecky tapes even, I'm not the first one that's
chosen even though I can do it,
and it is really frustrating.
- [Voiceover] Battling misogynistic beliefs of the males
around us is often a daily battle.
It is always the boys in the room who take
direction the worst.
If I am assertive then I am bossy, if I know what I want
and expect people to be on time and work to a high
standard, then I'm a diva, and if I call people out on
their lack of commitment to a project, then I'm a bitch.
The most frustrating thing is that all of these qualities
when reversed onto a man are all good
things about their character.
Men in my degree "know what they're talking about,
"are great leaders, have amazing directorial potential,"
while the women are "rude, bossy, bitchy," and "emotional."
I have even had a fellow student, male of course,
tell a group of us females to just "give up already,
"there's a reason there's so few women in TV and film."
- I saw a lot of women holding back about asserting
themselves on set, asserting themselves with their peers
because they feel worried about how they'll be perceived
and whether they'll be taken seriously.
And it's a real shame, because there's a lot of really,
really great workers out there who can do amazing work,
they just need to be taken as seriously
as their male counterparts.
A lot of the female film makers I spoke to also
talked about the importance as women in front of the
camera as well as behind the camera.
This is really interesting, I actually looked at some
statistics, and when you're looking a over a 20 year
period, the sort of top 2,000 films, they saw that the
films with the most gender balanced cast, so that was
like 42% women in three different films, all three
of the films, "Honey,"
"The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,"
and "Mean Girls," had a kind of focus on female
characters in front of the camera.
- That's what we're putting out to the world, and that's
what people are seeing from us.
So when the female characters only make up a really
small portion of main characters and kind of people
that get the most interesting lines and kind of
hero roles, then that's kind of what we're saying is
entertainment, that's what we're saying is good in
a lot of ways, and if women aren't there participating,
then it's kind of the whole industry saying
"well we don't think you're as important."
- [Voiceover] Not only are women less represented
behind the camera but also on screen.
There needs to be work done in both areas.
Make cinema a place for the female audience
members and creators, we need to see more complex
female characters.
The film making industry needs to understand the need
for a female perspective, and that female audience
members deserve better.
- [Voiceover] I started in the film business straight
out of college in 1982, I wasn't born
into a Hollywood family.
I was hired and started at the William Morris Agency.
I was going to make it.
I had the willpower, the nerve, and the "take no prisoners"
approach to the Hollywood power structure.
12 years later I left in a battered heap.
I was a writer and a good one, but the way Hollywood
worked back then went a little like this,
"there are no good roles for women, no one is writing
"for women, we need to write good roles for women,
"you need to stop writing about women Denise,
"scripts with female leads are never going to get made."
Everyone agreed it was a tragedy, but no one ever did
anything about it, and the next year particularly
during Oscar season, the lament would start all over again.
- So those are just some of the thoughts from the female
film makers that I spoke to, if you have any thoughts
about the gender imbalance in the industry,
please leave them in the comments below.
As I said, there are gonna be two more videos in this
series, so consider subscribing if you wanna be kept
up to date with that, and if you wan to help support
me with these videos, I'll leave the link to my Patreon
and my social media below.
Until I see you next time, bye.