'All-male nominees': Where are the women directors?

Ida Lupino, pioneering director (BFI, 2018)

Awards season has brought into sharp relief the inequality within Hollywood following the #MeToo movement. Natalie Portman took the opportunity of presenting the Best Director Golden Globe to point out that all the nominees were male, which was broadly applauded on social media for highlighting the gender disparity within directing. Similarly, no female directors were nominated for the BAFTAs, but Greta Gerwig was the first woman to be nominated for a Best Director Academy Award in eight years. She didn't win, though - only one woman has ever done that; Kathryn Bigelow in 2009.

These ceremonies are the platform on which these disparities are most visible and can help raise awareness, but complaining about the nominations is not going to fix the problem – we shouldn’t nominate a diverse range of people simply for the sake of being diverse if the films aren't the best-directed of the year. The issue stems from the career ladder; the fact is that many women are not given the same opportunities as men once they get into the film industry.

A study was conducted in 2016 by Stephen Follows, Alexis Kreager and Eleanor Gomes, commissioned by Directors UK, which explored where the gender inequality in UK film directors stemmed from and how it could be tackled. Follows states that they found "no evidence that that fewer women wish to become directors than men," enhanced by statistics which show that attendance at film schools across the country are almost an exact split down the middle in terms of gender (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Gender in film degrees/industry (Follows, Kreager and Gomes, 2016)

Figure 2: Female directors' career stats
(Follows, Kreager and Gomes, 2016)

Figure 2 shows where female representation in British directors begins to slip. As the proportion of women in each career stage declines, particularly steeply with the bigger career leaps, the proportion of male directors in accordance rockets up as they take the largest share of the most highly sought progressions. Shallows and co. conclude that, since their findings showed no disparity in men and women's drive to pursue directing careers, "the disparity must be a result of the preferences of those making hiring decisions rather than those applying for those positions." This was reinforced in their findings that women directors and key creatives hire a greater proportion of women into their teams than men do, which they conclude is due to differences in men and women's hiring practices.

This disparity has been discussed so much, but to see the numbers and to understand why this has happened for so long is a different story. With research such as this, and others like the Met Film School paper Met Spotlight On: Women and the Big Picture and Women And Hollywood film and TV statistics, readily available it is possible to find where women are being failed in the industry and change it.

While schemes have emerged to support women in film, these schemes help limited numbers of individuals towards achieving their goals within a gender-biased industry. Follows and co.'s report suggests three long-term solutions for tackling the root issues of the film industry to enable a gender-balanced directing body within the UK, including a target of 50/50 gender split in directors of publicly funded films by 2020 and holding diversity to account within the tax relief system of UK film funding. These are real, tangible steps that we can take towards evening the playing field and normalising equality, so that we can break out of the cycle the film industry is stuck in (Figure 3).

Figure 3: The current and possible cycles of female directors (Follows, Kreager and Gomes, 2016)

It will take time for the impact of these changes to be felt within the ranks of awards ceremonies. Whilst there have been successes such as Lady Bird and I am Not A Witch, as well as female-directed Mudbound's nominations which included the first female cinematographer to be nominated for an Academy Award, there is a long way to go. But if there is any time to make a change, it is now, in the light of all the change that is happening across the industry. By putting an end to harassment in the workplace, we ensure respect for women personally and professionally. We have to continue to support and affect these changes so that, some day, gender will not be seen as the distinguishing feature of award nominees.

Read more:
- NYFA infographics on gender inequality in the film industry 2018
- BFI's Statistical Yearbook contains details of gender divides in writers and directors for the past year
- Pamela Adlon interviews prominent women in TV for Interview magazine

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