WGAW Releases Latest Findings of 2014 Hollywood Writers Report

Scott Myers

14 Apr 2014 • 7 min read

Released today:

Research Shows Small Gains for Minority, Women, & Older TV Writers,
Film Employment for Minority and Women Writers Declines

Los Angeles — The Writers Guild of America, West has issued the Executive Summary of its 2014 Hollywood Writers Report, the WGAW’s analysis of the state of diversity in writing for television and film. While the latest report findings show modest gains for minority and women television writers, such increases are offset by a continuing decline in employment for women and minority screenwriters, illustrating the stark reality that the entertainment industry remains an inequitable landscape. The full report will be published in June.

The 2014 Hollywood Writers Report, subtitled “Turning Missed Opportunities Into Realized Ones” and the ninth in a series of semi-annual reports the Guild has commissioned, analyzes employment patterns for writers working on broadcast and cable TV shows during the 2011–2012 season, as well as writers writing for theatrical features during that same period, highlighting three specific groups who have traditionally been underemployed in the entertainment industry: women, minority, and older writers.

“The good news is that, since the last report published in 2011, there appears to have been small gains for women and minorities in television employment and earnings — though both groups still have quite a way to go to reach parity with their white male counterparts. The story for film, unfortunately, is not so good. Since the last report, there has been no progress for either group. Indeed, relative to white males, women and minorities have lost ground in the sector,” said 2014 HWR author Dr. Darnell M. Hunt, director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA and professor of sociology.

Hunt’s research shows that while minority and women writers have made incremental gains in employment over the past decade-plus period, current film and TV employment levels remain widely disproportionate to actual minority demographics of the U.S. population, and diverse writers remain substantially underrepresented on TV writing staffs and in feature films.

Key findings in the 2014 Hollywood Writers Report include:

Women Writers’ TV Employment Remains Static

Women remained underrepresented by a factor of nearly 2 to 1 among television writers in 2012, claiming just 27 percent of sector employment.

Women TV Writers Close Income Gap

Women television writers earned about 92 cents for every dollar earned by white males in 2012, up slightly from 91 cents in 2009.

Women Screenwriters Lose Ground in Film

In the film sector, women writers fell further behind their white male counterparts in 2012, accounting for just 15 percent of sector employment (down from 17 percent in 2009). Women remained underrepresented by a factor of more than 3 to 1 among screenwriters.

Gender Earnings Gap in Film Widens Again

The gender earnings gap in film has traditionally been greater than the gap in television. Women film writers earned just 77 cents for every dollar earned by white male film writers in 2012, down from 82 cents in 2009.

Minority TV Writers Increase Numbers and Close Earnings Gap

Minority television writers posted an increase in employment share (from 10 percent in 2009 to 11 percent in 2012), while also closing the earnings gap a bit with white male television writers. Nonetheless, minority writers remain underrepresented by a factor of about 3 to 1 among television writers.

There is still a major disconnect between the percentage of minority writers employed in television and film and the U.S. population, as minorities accounted for nearly 37 percent of the U.S. population in 2010, and by 2012 the majority of babies born in the United States were non-white. Data also show that minorities watch a disproportionate share of television and theatrical films, while increases in their consumer spending outpace the rest of the nation.

Minority Screenwriters’ Share of Film Employment Remains Low & Earnings Gap Widens

The previous report revealed that — after a decade of being stuck at 6 percent — the minority share of film employment dropped a percentage point to 5 percent in 2009. This figure remained at 5 percent in 2012, highlighting the fact that minorities continued to be underrepresented by a factor of about 7 to 1 among employed film writers.

On the film earnings front, the gap for minority film writers widened since the last report.

Older Writers’ Share of TV & Film Employment Remains Strong, Drops After 60

Older writers — particularly those aged 41 to 50 — claimed the largest share of employment in television and film, as well as the highest earnings in each sector. As previous reports have shown, however, the relative status of older writers tends to decline rather rapidly beyond the age of 60.

To read the 2014 HWR Executive Summary, click here.

As tempted as I am to say “Read it and weep,” I have to believe we have hit the bottom re these numbers and will only go up from here. Why?

Part of it is a gut instinct based on what feels like an unprecedented amount of articles, posts, tweets and links in social media driving home the point of gender and minority inequity among writers, directors, actors, and execs. I know the concept of ‘awareness’ is an amorphous thing, however I think there is a groundswell of attention during the last 1–2 years.

The other reason I am optimistic is based on facts: Movies that feature women prominently make more money, report says:

Conventional Hollywood wisdom (for lack of a better word) holds that films featuring women in prominent roles don’t perform as well as male-centric movies at the box office. But a new report from the number-crunching website FiveThirtyEight indicates that movies that have significant female characters actually offer a better return on investment overall than films that don’t.

The report analyzed the box office performance of 1,615 films released between 1990 and 2013, and whether the films pass the “Bechdel test,” an assessment created by cartoonist Alison Bechdel in a 1985 comic strip. Passing the three-point test requires that a movie include at least two named female characters, that they have a conversation with each other at some point, and that their conversation isn’t about a male character.

The findings indicated that while movies that pass the Bechdel test have a substantially lower median budget than all films in the sample, they make more money dollar for dollar than those that fail the test.

“The total median gross return on investment for a film that passed the Bechdel test was $2.68 for each dollar spent. The total median gross return on investment for films that failed was only $2.45 for each dollar spent,” Walt Hickey wrote.

He added, “And while this might be a side effect of films with lower budgets tending to have higher returns on investment than films with higher budgets, it’s still a strong indicator that films with women in somewhat prominent roles are performing well.”

That .23 cents difference may not seem like much to you, but you do the math for a typical studio’s acquisition, development, production and marketing budget per each movie, and that adds up to tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars, not an insubstantial amount.

As always, Hollywood cares about profits, first and foremost. If they can see proof that movies featuring prominent female roles do better, eventually that will become the conventional wisdom. And when that happens, I think it’s safe to say that will create more job opportunities for female writers, female directors, and female actors.

If you don’t believe this can happen, consider the shift the studios have made to increase the number of movies targeting adults. Once it became clear that young adult males were spending significantly less money on movies than in years past, and that Baby Boomers and Senior Citizens are still a reliable movie audience, the studios have responded by adding more adult movies to their slates.

As a frame of reference, when I started this blog in 2008, adult dramas were considered dead. Here we are 6 years later and they are very much alive witness these films set for release for the rest of this year: Heaven is for Real, Belle, Million Dollar Arm, And So It Goes, The Hundred-Foot Journey, When the Game Stands Tall, Addicted, A Walk Among the Tombstones, Gone Girl, The Judge, Exodus, Unbroken. And that doesn’t include thrillers, comedies and other dramas like The Fault in Our Stars which while targeting young adults will benefit from a strong adult presence as well, nor the plethora of indie movies scheduled for release.

With the ginormous success of Frozen, The Hunger Games, and The Heat among others, I believe there’s a crack in the glass ceiling. The numbers of the recent WGA report reflect a period from 2011–2012. I would hope that the report 2 years from now will show an uptick. And we may already be seeing it on the TV side, even if the improvement is nominal.

Here’s the thing: We have to keep pushing. Keep talking about it, keep writing about it. This is not just about gender equity and opportunities for minority creatives, although that’s certainly a big chunk of it. It’s about storytelling, too. Stories featuring different characters, female and minority, with unique personalities, cutting across conventional wisdom or exposing the realities of contemporary society that mainstream media hasn’t picked up on yet, ought to be — at least in theory — more interesting.

However this raises an ancillary subject: Purely from a writing standpoint, the choices we make cannot simply be to arbitrarily increase the number of women and minorities in our stories. Rather we have to ground those choices in the context of the organic process of digging into each story while carrying with us an awareness of the possibility for different characters and character types. I have more thoughts on this, but for now suffice to say, we won’t be doing anyone any favors if we insert into our stories female characters or African-American characters who comes across as thin stereotypes or worse, stuck there simply to satisfy some sort of quota. As writers, we can do better than that.

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