Under-Representation of Women in Screenwriting
This subject arose yesterday in an intriguing fashion with this tweet:
Click on this link to check out the current statistics of submissions to the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting competition. And sure enough at the time of this post, the breakdown by gender is this: Male — 74.9%, Female — 25.1%.
What do these numbers mean, if anything?
Shaula Evans, moderator at The Black Board, created a thread there to dig into the subject [you can go here to see that conversation]. Here are some excerpts from Shaula’s initial post:
What a great springboard to launch a conversation about under-representation in screenwriting.
For most people, especially our regulars around here, the concepts arising in this conversation are just common sense, but for some people, this topic is very political. Before we proceed, I want to clearly state some parameters for this discussion.
1. Under-Representation is a Bad Thing. Diversity is a Good Thing.
People telling their own stories is a good thing. People seeing characters like themselves portrayed as heroes is a good thing. Allowing a greater range of people to fully participate in manufacturing culture is a good thing. Having a deeper and broader understanding of the varieties of human experience makes us smarter, better, more compassionate people, enriches our culture, and makes us less likely to repeat the dark chapters of our history.
We’re going to take this as a given for this discussion and not put it up for debate.
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3. “Where are all the women?” is an old Internet Meme.
I’ve had this conversation many times over in every male-dominated Internet community I have ever belonged to (at least those with any iota of self-awareness). I confess: I come to this discussion a little bit tired. The topic and the issues it potentially addresses are important and real and even in many cases urgent. But, the discussion almost always unfolds along the same lines. [I’m going to throw around some feminist and academic terms here and I’ll try to hotlink them to good explanations; if you have questions please read the links.]
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4. This isn’t about just women. AKA Welcome to Intersectionality.
“Where are the women” pops up more than other similar potential questions, both online and offline, because it is relatively easy to tell from people’s names if they are male or female, and unless you are collecting demographic data, it ranges from difficult to impossible to tell what proportion of your community are people of color or GLBTQ, have disability issues, are members of minority religions, are economically disadvantaged, etc. Geography is certainly an obstacle of a different kind that many of us right here are actively tackling. Age discrimination is a terrible scourge in American TV writing. And where women are under-represented other people often are, too, and their lack of participation and representation can be even harder to address because it is an “invisible” problem. So we’re going to open this up beyond the question of gender and look at the broader question of under-representation of any group in screenwriting, along with examples of programs and resources that are addressing obstacles to those groups.
The post has generated a lot of comments. Here was my initial contribution:
For some historical context, a majority of scenario writers when the film business first began over 100 years ago were women: Gene Gauntier, Anita Loos, Francis Marion, and many others were prominent throughout the silent film era. It helped that perhaps the biggest film star of that time was Mary Pickford and thus it was only natural that she would team up with writers like Marion on movie projects.
There have been many theories about why this happened. Here’s one: Broadly speaking, men were less well-educated than women. Since men worked and women were responsible for their children’s education, it makes sense that women would have more in the way of learning, one component of which was writing. Thus in the fledgling film industry’s frantic efforts to seek out writers to churn out scenarios to be produced, it was likely that more women than men submitted stories for consideration.
By the mid-to-late twenties and with the advent of sound in 1927, dialogue became a much more prominent need for the studios. Another generalization, but that’s the time when Hollywood turned toward journalists as writers because of their — presumably — good ear for dialogue, honed by working on the streets. And journalism at that time was largely a male dominated field.
Jumping to the present, what caught Franklin’s eye about the current Nicholl numbers and mine as well is the disproportionately low percentage of female writers submitting scripts to the competition. Is this an indication of frustration bordering on hopelessness about the situation in Hollywood? I would hope not. Just in the last 10 days, there have been several notable deals in Hollywood involving women writers:
Katie Dippold sells untitled action comedy pitch to Chernin Entertainment with Paul Feig attached to direct.
Helen Schulman adapting her novel “This Beautiful Life” for Killer Films with Susanne Bier to direct.
Barbara Marshall, 2012 Black List writer (“Peste”) adapting “Exorcism Diaries” for LionsGate/Summit Entertainment.
Plus the success of movies like Hanna, Salt, and The Hunger Games with strong female leads in action roles is more than just symbolic: Those movies made money. And results like that can change perceptions.
It’s a complicated issue, one we’ve taken up in the past. I thought it was something we should discuss again.
I also encourage you to check out the conversation at The Black Board which you can do here.
My bottom line is this: I want better movies. I want more diverse filmmaking voices. I want all writers to have an opportunity to succeed in Hollywood.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the matter.
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