Gender in the International Film Business
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 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…
New data on gender within the global film business (see below for the overview)
New analysis of existing data, looking at whether a filmmaker's gender matters to audiences
All the existing studies I could find on gender within a film industry, in the UK and globally.
So, for the first part – some new data I’ve gathered. In summary…
Across the whole world, 42.5% of professionals in the film business are women
Taiwan, China and Thailand have the highest percentage of women in their film business
The only countries which have over 50% women in their film industries are Taiwan, China, Thailand, Russia, Hong Kong, Lithuania, Malaysia, Ukraine and Romania.
39% of UK film professionals are women
Mexico, India and Iran have the lowest percentage of women in their film business
Only 24% of the film professionals in Iran are women
The only film sectors in which women are the majority are Marketing, Publicity and PR
Women account for only a third of film professionals within Management
Gender in International Film Business, by Country
Some areas of the film industry are more visible than others. We can all watch a film and perform the Bechdel Test ourselves to look at gender representation for characters. However, much of the decisions about which films get shot are made behind closed doors and so it was this side that I wanted to investigate. In order to get a cross section of film professionals throughout the world, I decided to research the gender split within attendees of major film markets.
Film markets take place every few months, and the largest is the Cannes Marché du Film in May. These events allow the film industry to gather, seek finance, build co-productions and sell the rights to distribute films to audiences around the world. To be ‘officially accredited’ at a major film market you normally need to prove your participation in the professional film industry and pay a fee. There will be few film professionals who haven’t attended a major film market in the last five years. Consequently, I feel that these numbers are representative of the gender split within the international business side of the film industry.
Gender in International Film Business, by Sector
Marketing, Publicity and PR are the only sectors where women make up over half of the participants. In fact, women are twice as common in Publicity and PR than they are in Management.
The two largest sectors, by number, are Management and Production, accounting for a combined total of 53% of attendees, which explains why two thirds of the sectors are ‘above average’. In my PDF report I have broken down each sector by country but sadly there is not enough space in this blog article to publish all the charts. You can get the report at the top of this page.
Next Up - Gender In Film Audiences
That enough business time for now. In a few days I will publish the next part of this gender study, looking at film audiences and whether female filmmakers make films for women or if audiences are indifferent to the gender of a film's creators.
Epilogue
I have been ablely supported in this study by Alyssa Thorne to whom I am very grateful. While I have been crunching number she has been contacting film commissions, industry bodies and pressure groups for background research. In addition, I have been helped by Catherine P and by Nick at the BFI's Research and Statistics Unit.
