A Surprisingly Simple Solution For Women Directors

A Whole New System to Advance Women Directors

By Maria Giese

In the past 20 years female director employment numbers in Hollywood have been in stasis and decline, even while those of ethnic minority males have moved steadily up.

It is good news that diversity among directors is increasing, but why are women being left behind? As always in the United States, men of every ethnicity come before women of any ethnicity.

According to the current US Census Bureau stats, ethnic minority males make up 17.9% of the US population. They comprise 7% of DGA director members, and they helm 17% of episodic TV shows.

According to “The Guardian” list of top 40 international feature directors, 25% were ethnic minority males. Just 2 were women. It is possible to suggest that in terms of directors, ethnic minority males have arrived. Their numbers, in terms of ratio, are no longer disparate.

Women have been left behind. Women make up 51% of the US population, are not a “minority” and yet comprise just 13.7% of DGA director members, and direct just 14% of TV. And we know they direct less than 5% of studio features.

For this reason, in 2013 the DGA Women’s Proposals Committee drew up a detailed proposal to include women’s issues in the 2014 Guild-studio Collective Bargaining negotiations. Longtime DGA Executive Director, Jay Roth, led the negotiations last fall, but newly elected DGA president, Paris Barclay (himself an ethnic minority male), was an important voice.

Primary to the proposal was that, if female directors are to move forward, they need a program solely dedicated to the advancement of women. Unfortunately, when the negotiations concluded last December, women remained buried within the general category of “diversity” in all DGA-studio Agreements.

Under the new contract, the studios can continue to address diversity requirements without hiring any women at all. In fact, there is no legal obligation for producers and studio executives to advance women in any way; the only legal stipulation is that ‘diversity’ hiring improves. This can (and often does) mean hiring men of diversity—not women.

In order for the Agreements to benefit women, especially women of color, the DGA and studios must create a separate program for women of all ethnicities as a category in their own right.

How would it work?

The Guild and the studios would adjust their diversity agreements (the DGA Basic Agreement, Article 15 & the FLTTA, Article 19) from a single diversity mandate to include an additional program solely dedicated to increasing female employment.

It’s very simple:

If the DGA and the studios agree to create a distinct program for women, the studios will then have a legal obligation to hire more female directors. Today their only mandate is to increase diversity hires (usually meaning men), but under the two-pie system, studios would have to BOTH increase ethnic minority hires and female hires.

How will this impact women of color?

Under the double-mandate, two-pie system, female ethnic minorities would be counted twice, so it is greatly to their advantage. Women of color are often under the mistaken impression that they are currently counted twice (“twofer tokenism”) because administrators involved in diversity hiring often erroneously believe that themselves.

Counting an individual twice in a single pie, however, is a mathematical impossibility.

On the other hand, in a two-pie, double-mandate system, women of color could be counted twice: once in the female category, and once in the ethnic minority category. That would give them a numerical edge.

Women of color are the most disadvantaged population of all, so this increase in potential opportunity seems defensible. Recent DGA statistics showed that in 2013 the employment of women directors of ethnicity had dropped from a “criminally” low 4% to 2%.

Where the advancement of women is concerned, it is better to allow an advantage to women of color, rather than leave all women directors to languish under the current single-mandate diversity system that has indisputably proven to fail females for decades.

To clarify, women directors must be provided their own program, because under the current system

1) Women get buried under the general category of “Diversity.” The studios can fulfill obligations to the DGA Diversity Agreements simply by hiring male ethnic minorities, without hiring females at all.

2) Women make up 51% of the U.S. population and are not a minority population, yet they are treated as such under the current system. Today, only 13.7% of the DGA director category is comprised of women, but the pool of eligible women from which show-runners and executives hire directors, is actually much larger.

This is so because the executives and showrunners do not hire directors strictly from the Guild. Anyone can flow into the employment stream— film school graduates, production executives, writers and editors, show cast and crew, and so on.

There is no defined skill-set required to direct. Everyone is a first-time director at one point. In terms of calculating percentages of qualified directors by gender, therefore, the general population is a more accurate pool than the director membership at the DGA.

In addressing the question of breaking women out as a separate class, Paris Barclay recently indicated that it would not happen during his presidency. As he put it: “We (diversity members) have got to stick together in this.”

Sticking together, in fact, has been just one more reason women have fallen so far behind in their employment numbers. Today, ethnic minority males comprise 7% of the director membership, but helm over 17% of TV episodes. Women, on the other hand, who comprise 13.7% of the director membership direct just 14% of TV episodes: white women get 12% and women of color helm only 2%.

This itself reveals a cunning circle. The Guild and the studios point their fingers at each other in an endless blame-game to seek a scapegoat for Hollywood’s almost complete and certainly unlawful exclusion of women directors. A woman cannot become a member of the Guild unless she is hired for work, yet the number of female hires remains miniscule, keeping the percentage of women DGA directors low.

Although the DGA is now ramping up efforts to increase the number of female DGA director members (currently about 1,200), it has traditionally used those the disparate gender ratios to justify the low number of female hires.

As Paris Barclay stated at the 2013 DGA Women Director’s Summit: “Considering the ratio of male to female directors in the Guild, I’d say the studios are doing pretty well.” The studios may be doing well, but women are not. And there is no reason to believe things will ever improve without a sweeping change to the current industry diversity policy.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has recently called attention to the rampant discrimination faced by female directors. As the Melissa Goodman, Senior Staff Attorney at the ACLU of Southern California wrote:

“Gender bias – like all forms of bias – is complex and hard to dismantle, but the statistics alone strongly suggest that more action is needed in the industry. The DGA says it is working to address the problem and reportedly has new diversity agreements with the studios that strengthen enforcement and require improved programs to help women and people of color break into directing work (…) No doubt truly effective diversity programs and real enforcement of these agreements (and employers’ legal obligation not to engage in sex discrimination) would make a real difference.”

The ACLU is currently calling for women directors to contact them to tell their stories: https://www.aclu.org/secure/my-story-woman-director
Please click on that link and tell your story today. And please support efforts to initiate a new DGA-studio program solely dedicated to the advancement of women. The creation of a separate mandate for women is an essential step in solving on-going sex discrimination in the American film and television industry.

Originally Posted on January 24, 2015