Women and ethnic minorities are making advancements in the world of episodic directing — but a sneak peak of the Director’s Guild of America’s annual report concedes that the figures for the 2015–16 season mark “only a slight improvement.”
Women directed 17.1 percent of television episodes during the 2015–16 season, an improvement from 2014–15’s 15.8 percent. Given the increased attention and awareness of how severely women directors are underrepresented, an increase of 1.3 percent feels rather underwhelming — even discouraging. And while the number of ethnic minority directors has also improved, the difference from last year’s figure is even slighter than 1.3 percent. In the 2015–16 season, 18.5 percent of episodes were directed by ethnic minorities, compared to 2014–15’s 17.7 percent, a change of less than one percent.
So the numbers are improving, ever-so-slightly. But the rate at which they’re moving certainly leaves much to be desired, and these figures remain unacceptable.
A press release from the DGA describes “a marked difference in hiring patterns between the major networks — which were the clear leaders in diverse hiring — and the basic cable and pay-TV networks.” Further details will be provided in the full-length report, which will be released in the summer. We are eager to learn of the percentage of episodes helmed by female ethnic minority-directors — unfortunately we’re betting that this figure is considerably lower than both the average of female-directed episodes and ethnic minority-directed episodes.
A previous study from the DGA revealed that “women and minority directors face significant hiring disadvantage at entry level.” And research has shown that who works behind-the-scenes influences the gender of the crew as well as the characters portrayed on-screen. In her report of the 2014–15 season, Dr. Martha Lauzen of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film wrote, “Programs with at least one woman executive producer or creator featured a higher percentage of female characters and employed substantially greater percentages of women writers, directors, and editors than programs with exclusively male executive producers or creators.”
“It’s important for us to share hiring data during this critical period. As the networks convene in New York to present their fall lineups and court billions in advertising dollars, they’re also deciding on who they’ll hire to direct — to bring these stories to life for an increasingly diverse audience,” said DGA President Paris Barclay. He added, “There’s much work to be done by the networks, studios, and producers to repair the broken hiring pipeline they’ve shaped, and then neglected over the years. We’ll be providing an in-depth analysis of the entire television season later this summer with a very close eye on new entrants to the pipeline, analyzing who is getting hired for those critical breaks as first-time episodic television directors.”
Read Melissa Silverstein’s open letter to Barclay, where Women and Hollywood’s editor in chief speaks to the “crisis” going on in his Guild and the industry.
If you want to support series that feature an inclusive directing roster, here are a few suggestions: “Transparent,” “Orange is the New Black,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Jane the Virgin,” and Ava DuVernay’s upcoming “Queen Sugar.”
