As regular readers will know, for the last nine months I’ve been working on a deep and comprehensive study of gender inequality in the UK film industry. Today I’m pleased to be able to share the results (although less pleased with the content of the results!).
Download the full reportYou can read the full report by clicking on the button above and I have summarised the key findings in this article.
The report is broken down into three main sections…
Today’s article is an offshoot of two strands of research I’ve been working on over the past few years – gender in the film industry and UK films with public funding. I looked at the percentage of female writers, producers and directors within UK films, focusing on how the female representation changes between films supported by a public body and those that are not.
In summary…
Last week, Oscar-nominated actress Maggie Gyllenhaal was widely quoted as saying that (by Hollywood standards) she is already “too old” to play the on-screen love interest of a 55-year-old man in romantic movies. She’s 37. Following this, I have been asked by a few regular readers to crunch the numbers and look at whether there has historically been an age gap between male and female actors in romantic films.
So I built up a dataset of 422 romantic films (“rom coms” and romantic dramas) that grossed over $1m at the US box office and were released between 1984 and 2014. I then determined which two actors were the main hetrosexual on-screen couple (details of the methodology is at the bottom of the article) and looked …
Last week I looked at the most employed people in the UK film industry. This week I thought I would merge this approach with a topic I have written a lot about previously, namely gender. I took a look at the women in the British film industry who have the most credits over the last 10 years across all UK films budgeted over £500k. In summary…
Just 11% of …
Last month, I published a report into what percentage of crews on the top US grossing films of the past 20 years are women. I found that, on average, women made up only 23% of a typical film crew and in some jobs such as cinematography and composing, it was around 2%. The results were reported widely and sparked a healthy debate about the causes and what, if anything, should be done.
One consequence was that I was asked by a number of people what the situation is in the UK. This project was far too large to fit into a single blog post, so I’ve written it up as a PDF report. It spans 17 pages and breaks down the results in much …
Today I am releasing the results of a long-term project. For a while, I’ve been looking at the numbers behind female film crew members over the past 20 years.
The results are pretty shocking, and should hopefully serve as a wake up call to parts of the industry. I don’t believe that the majority of the industry is fundamentally sexist or anti-women but when you look at these results, especially over time, it’s plain to see that something is wrong and it isn’t fixing itself.
Download the full report now, for free. This project was far too large to fit into a single blog post, so I’ve written it up as a PDF report. It spans 16 pages and breaks down the results in much more detail. The …
I should start this article with a personal note – I don’t like what I’ve found. I always try to approach data impartially and not look for certain results. Inevitably, this sometimes leads to results which challenge my beliefs or my opinions. I am a firm believer that the representation of women on screen is often woefully poor and needs addressing.
Last week the guys at FiveThirtyEight published a great analysis of the box office performance of films which pass the Bechdel Test. My first thought was ‘damn’ as I have also been working on a similar study. They have been extremely thorough and it’s well worth reading their article. In order to avoid repeating their work I have shifted my research …
This is the fourth of ten articles revealing the results of my survey of 1,235 film industry professionals. More details of the survey and my methodology can be found here and for any questions or clarification please contact me.
If you would like to read the full survey results right now then sign up for my email mailing list. I’ll send you the full 25 page PDF report entirely free. You’ll also get updates on my weekly blog articles on film data and statistics. I won’t send you any spam and you can unsubscribe at any time. Just add your email to the subscription box at the top of this page and you’ll be sent a download link.
Key Findings – Women in filmThis is the second of a three part series on gender in the film industry. The first article was published on Monday and looked at new data I’ve gathered for the global film business. The third article will be published on Friday and is a collation of all the film gender studies I could find.
The blog articles cannot cover all of the information I have gathered so I am creating a PDF report that includes all the gender studies and data. If you want to receive the full 30 page report then please join my free mailing list via the box to the right and I’ll send you the PDF once it’s ready. The report will contain…
This is the first of a three part series on gender in the film industry, which I’ve wanted to look at for a long time. It’s taken a while to put this together and the end result is three blog posts and a whole heap of graphs. This article looks at new data I’ve gathered for the global film business, the second article looks at film audiences and the final post is a collation of all the film gender studies I could find. The blog articles cannot cover all of the information I have gathered so I am creating a PDF report that includes all the gender studies and data. If you want to receive the full 30 page report …