While we at Women and Hollywood, and others in the industry, have been fighting for women to be given the opportunities to direct in film and television, there’s one segment of the business that needs some serious attention: commercials and advertising.
As Valentina Valentini reports at Mashable, a huge swath of ads target female consumers, but women “are calling the shots on these projects roughly as often as they are in Hollywood. Which is to say, hardly at all.”
An unnamed female commercial director began compiling a list of the other women she knew directing advertisements and brought the info to Mashable. The results are maddening: Only 9.7 percent of rostered directors on the AdAge Production Company A-List are women.
Mashable continues, “Though measured from different criteria, that number is still in line with the 9 percent of the top 250 grossing films of 2015 directed by women, according to the latest Celluloid Ceiling study from San Diego State’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film (the numbers are just slightly higher for broadcast, cable, and streaming TV).”
However, there’s no way to find out if those rostered women are even being hired to direct or are constantly working.
“There is nothing covert about the discrimination of women when you see the numbers,” Alma Har’el, who directed a Stella Artois campaign, told Mashable. “It’s obvious that there is a gender superiority complex — not to mention a racial superiority complex — when you see who gets the jobs as well as who commissions them. It’s mostly white men giving jobs to other white men.”
Har’el was the first woman ever to direct a commercial for Stella Artois in the Belgian beer’s 20 years of advertising. She was also the first woman to do a campaign for Facebook, AirBnB, and Uber.
“I started to notice that I was almost always the only woman in the room,” Har’el continued. “I never really identified as a woman or as a foreigner, I truly believed I’m not those things because I’m something else that’s deeper so why associate myself with any of these identities. But after seeing sets that were 95 percent men, it became clear to me that there’s a fight that needs to take place. That the numbers don’t lie.”
A separate client feedback firm recently published a list of the 50 best commercials directors in the world and only one of them was a woman. Lauren Greenfield, who directed the award-winning as campaign for Always called “Like a Girl,” came in at number 38.
This is a big problem for a number of reasons. It means that women are discriminated against among all types of directing jobs, even for commercial gigs for products that supposedly target women. It’s also preventing women from climbing in the ranks. Many successful television and film directors start out directing for commercials. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle of discrimination where women can’t even get their foot in the door. If getting hired for that big-budget tent pole requires an indie film directing credit, which requires a television credit, which requires a commercial credit, how are women, who can’t even get a gig directing ads, going to make it to the top tier?
Women like Har’el are doing what they can. “I moved to a commercial company that’s owned by a woman, I committed my producer to hiring 30–50 percent women on our sets. That’s been very challenging for him since so many women don’t have the experience that gets them approved with the advertising agencies because they’re been discriminated [against] for so long.”
For the entire report, head over to Mashable.
