From The Chicago Tribune…
Women, sexism and Hollywood: A look at the numbers
By Maureen Ryan
The women who work on “The Daily Show” have said, in response to a recent Jezebel story about the show’s “Woman Problem,” that they don’t feel marginalized, but the fact remains, the most powerful positions on most shows are usually occupied by men.
Felicia Day, creator of the Web series “The Guild,” is just one woman who managed to bypass quite a few of the obstacles thaw women face in Hollywood by doing her own thing and putting it on online. There’s more on that in this story on “The Guild” and at the end of this post, but let’s look at some cold, hard numbers before we get to that.
In the 2008-‘09 television season, women comprised 25 percent of “all creators, executive producers, producers, directors, writers, editors and directors of photography working on situation comedies, drama and reality programs,” according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.
The most powerful creative people in the television industry tend to be show creators and/or showrunners (i.e., the executive producers in charge on a day to day basis), but only 21 percent of the creators and 23 percent of the executive producers in the 2008-‘09 season were women, according to the Center (the summary of the 2008-‘09 report is here).
Statistics from the Writers Guild of America paint a similar picture. As I’ve noted in the past, in 2007, 28 percent of all writing credits went to women—a 2 percent uptick from 1999, when 26 percent of credits went to women.
To put this in context, an ongoing gender-bias class-action suit against Wal-Mart alleges that, among other things, only 33 percent of the company’s management is female, according to this New York Times story. The percentage that helped launch a lawsuit from Wal-Mart employees would represent an improvement for women in the entertainment industry.
“I’ve been confronted by misogyny on a staff before,” “Eureka” co-executive producer Amy Berg said in a lively writers roundtable posted at io9.com. “It’s just sad that this sort of thing still exists. The really horrible thing about this kind of behavior is that it’s not something you can change. You can’t talk things out. I tried that. It’s just something that’s ingrained in people. And if you don’t have support from your showrunner (or if the person is your showrunner), all you can do is pack your stuff and move on to bigger and better things.”
Most late-night writings staffs still employ no or very few women (and Lynn Harris’ January Slate piece is a must-read dissection of that situation). “The Daily Show” recently hired two women for its writing staff, but as Melissa Silverstein pointed out on the Women and Hollywood blog, now the percentage of writers at that show is 11.7 percent, as opposed to zero.
“Now, none of us who write about this stuff believe that no women work on late night shows. We know they do. We know that they contribute to their success,” Silverstein wrote. “I watch the show. I think it’s funny. I just want more female writers and correspondents. Because I know that women can be as funny as men both behind the scenes and on the air.”
Doing “The Guild” online, on a shoestring budget, has allowed Day and producer Kim Evey to circumvent some of the obstacles that women still face in Hollywood—such as bigwigs who aren’t prepared to take women seriously.
“I’ve had some professional studio meetings, and the ones where I really got glammed up, I’ve had questions like, ‘You didn’t really write that script, did you?’ I’ve actually had a couple of producers or executive people ask me that to my face,” Day said with a rueful laugh. “Then, when you dress really down, put the glasses on and look more nerdy—there’s no question about [who wrote the series]. So it is kind of a double standard, in a sense. And I don’t think it’s just from men, it’s also the way actors are perceived in Hollywood. Unless you’re in Hollywood, you don’t really understand how actors are treated—either like dirt, or you’re a god, and there’s no in-between.
“It’s funny to be in a position where I’m doing my own stuff—it makes me want to produce and write more, because you do get more respect in general because of that.”
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