What percentage of a film crew is female?

As many of you shooters know, I blog weekly about film data and statistics. Normally my audience is almost exclusively industry but this week I seem to have hit a nerve and it's been covered by the civilian press.



My article is here stephenfollows.com/gender-of-film-crews/...



I looked at the gender split within the film crews of the top 2,000 films of the past 20 years. The headline figures are...



* Women make up only 23% of crew members on the 2,000 highest grossing films of the past 20 years.

* Only one of the top 100 films in 2013 has a female Composer.

* In 2013, under 2% of Directors were female.

* The only departments to have a majority of women are Make-up, Casting and Costume

* Visual Effects is the largest department on most major movies and yet only has 17.5% women

* Of all the departments, the Camera and Electrical department is the most male, with only 5% women

* Musicals and Music-based films have the highest proportion of women in their crews (27%).

* Sci-Fi and Action films have the smallest proportion of women (20% and 21% respectively).

* The films with the highest percentage were "Mean Girls" and "The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants" (42%).

* The most male crews were "On Deadly Ground" and "Robots" (10% female).



The most surprising thing to me is that it's not changing over time...



* There has been no improvement in the last 20 years. The percentage of female crew members has decreased between 1994 (22.7%) and 2013 (21.8%).

* The three most significant creative roles (Writer, Producer and Director) have all seen the percentage of women fall.

* The jobs performed by women have become more polarised. In jobs which are traditionally seen as more female (art, costume and make-up) the percentage of women has increased, whereas in the more technical fields (editing and visual effects) the percentage of women has fallen.



The Guardian covered it today of page 3 ("Phhaoor look at the stats on that...." etc). www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jul/22/gen.... Check out the comments for some rather eclectic opinions.



This study was just measuring employment so the next stage will be to measure gender within film schools (and other entry points to the industry) and try to ascertain why there is an imbalance of women to men in the industry. If it's 100% by choice then I don't think most people will mind. However, many feel that it reveals rampent sexisim. I'll be honest and say I don't know.



What do Shooters think? Why is our industry so heavily male? Does it matter? Is the industry institutionally sexist? If so, what can be done?

