Hey women TV writers, time to polish those scripts. The Writers Guild of America West has opened up the submission period for their 2016–2017 TV Writers Access Project, which is open to guild members who are minorities, women, LGBT, disabled, and/or over the age of 55.
The goal of the project, according to the WGA, is to “identify excellent diverse writers in order to provide a hiring resource for television writer-producers.”
“It is our hope that the Project will provide increased access to WGAW members from groups that have been historically underemployed in television and will also be of benefit to showrunners and other executives who are staffing television shows by creating a strong pool of diverse candidates for their hiring consideration,” WGA West stated on its website.
According to Dr. Martha Lauzen’s report “Boxed In 2015–16: Women On Screen and Behind the Scenes in Television,” women accounted for only 27 percent of all individuals working as creators, directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and directors of photography on broadcast network programs. More specifically, 71 percent of series had no women writers.
Hopefully, this project, now in its eight year, will help improve those numbers and lead to more diverse and inclusive writing teams in television.
WGAW members are invited to submit one piece of literary material: one spec script for a television series in first run on either network or cable as of August 8, 2016 OR one original spec pilot teleplay, in either the half-hour or one-hour format.
The deadline for submission is 6pm on November 18, 2016. For more details, rules, and requirements, read the full description of the project at the WGA West’s website.
