The ACLU is putting pressure on New York legislators to pass a bill that would make the state the first to grant financial incentives to TV shows that hire women and minority writers and directors, Deadline reported. The bill would allocated $5 million of the state’s already existing Empire State Film Production Tax Credit of $420 million for the cause. The New York Civil Liberties Union, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, and the ACLU Women’s Rights Project released a joint statement in support.
“Discrimination in the television industry is a serious civil rights problem that affects us all,” said Melissa Goodman, director of the LGBTQ, Gender and Reproductive Justice Project at the ACLU SoCal. “Excluding the voices of women and people of color from one of our most powerful cultural products reinforces stereotypes and bias people experience in their everyday lives. It’s clear that the industry needs the incentives called for in this bill, along with external pressure from civil rights enforcement agencies, to finally fix this long-running, entrenched problem.”
As Women and Hollywood recently reported, Robin Thede, a writer and performer for “The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore,” penned a personal essay for Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter calling for the support of the bill as well.
A recent DGA study found that “in the 2014–2015 network season and the 2014 cable season, white men directed 69 percent of the episodes while men of color directed only 15 percent, and that white women directed only 13 percent and women of color directed just 3 percent. A recent WGA study found that women make up just 30 percent of television writers, while only 13 percent are people of color.”
“New York is an entertainment capital and a progressive leader,” said Bernadette Brown, deputy legislative director for the New York Civil Liberties Union. “By creating incentives for equity and inclusion in television, the state has a powerful opportunity to promote greater awareness of how we perceive race and gender, and how we act on those perceptions.”
