Statistics
MPAA Report 2016: 52% of Movie Audiences Are Women & Other Takeaways
Women continue to make up the majority of moviegoers: According to the MPAA’s recent findings, women comprised 52 percent of all 2016 moviegoers — an increase from 2015’s 51 percent....
Number of Comedy Central Specials from Women Slowly-but-Surely Increasing
At the beginning of the decade it was pretty much bros making stuff for other bros — plus “The Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” — at Comedy Central. But since the advent of...
Shonda Rhimes, Rachel Bloom, and More Named as “Most Powerful Showrunners”
Judging from The Hollywood Reporter’s “Hollywood’s 50 Most Powerful Showrunners 2016” report, television is still far from reaching its gender parity zenith that some dream it to be. Still,...
Study: Number of Female Protagonists On Screen Improved in 2015 — But Not By Much
Today sees the release of the It’s A Man’s (Celluloid) World report for 2015, the annual study which examines the portrayal of female characters featured in the top 100 domestic grossing films of...
New Study Charts the “Post-Festival Chasm” for Women Directors
After becoming the first black woman filmmaker to win the Best Director prize at the Sundance Film Festival (for her second narrative feature “Middle of Nowhere”), Ava DuVernay waited for people...
Study: Female Characters Are Trapped Under Professional Glass Ceilings in the Movies
Back in February, Dr. Martha Lauzen observed in her annual Celluloid Ceiling Report that male characters are nearly twice as likely (61%) to be identified with a profession than their female...
Study: Women Made up the Majority of Moviegoers in 2014
It’s broken-record time again. For the 5th year ina row, women made up the majority of moviegoers in US and Canada in 2014, according to newresearch released by the MPAA. Women also purchased 50%...
WGA Study: Declines for Female and Minority TV Writers “Across the Board”
Over the last three years, the employment of women and minority TV writers has suffered a sharp fall. According to a WGA-West study comparing the 2011–12 and 2013–14 TV seasons, writers rooms...
Study: Diverse Movies and TV Shows Earn More Money and Attract More Viewers
If you’re reading this site, chances are good you’ve heard of “Empire,” the new FOX drama that has increased its audience every single week since its series premiere seven weeks ago. There...
Study: Fewer Women Directing and Writing Movies Than 17 Years Ago
If Hollywood were graded on how well it excluded women directors from making films, it’d receive an A. The newest Celluloid Ceiling Report from Dr. Martha Lauzen at San Diego State finds that men...
Women Created Only 20% of TV Shows Last Season
The current narrative in the media zeitgeist is that TV is so much better for women than film. Well, it might seem so on the surface, because you see more women on our TV screens, but when you drill...
Directors UK: Women Represent Only 14% of the Directors in UK TV
According to a new report from Directors UK entitled Who’s Calling the Shots?, women in the UK are directing only 14% of the TV shows. Weirdly, or not so weirdly, those stats exactly match the...
MPAA Data Shows That Women Are Still The Majority of Moviegoers
In their annual release of box office statistics during the movie upfronts known as CinemaCon, the MPAA data showed that women are still the majority of filmgoers, and we buy half of all the...
Female Protagonists Underrepresented Onscreen Five to One
Remember last week when we were all so happy about what Cate Blanchett said at the Oscars? Well, no matter how much money women make, there was almost five male protagonists for every female one...
No Meaningful Change Over Time in Female Filmmaker Participation at the Sundance Film Festival Among New Research Released Today at Sundance
This morning, Women in Film and the Sundance Institute released the next stage of research on female filmmakers. Last year they released an unprecedented first phase in the work that began the...
Celluloid Ceiling Report: No Progress in 16 Years for Women in Hollywood
Every January for the past 16 years, people who care about women’s progress behind the scenes in the film industry have restlessly anticipated Dr. Martha Lauzen’s Celluloid Ceiling analysis of...
Cross Post — 13 Myths Hollywood Uses to Hide Discrimination Against Women Directors
1. The number of women directors is so small because women are not really interested in directing and few women are exceptional enough to do a man’s job. Right, so 3,500 women DGA members pay...
DGA Report: Women Represent Only 14% of TV Directors
The DGA has released its annual report tracking the statistics of directors on episodic TV shows for the 2012–2013 season, and the news is that there is no news. The numbers have remained pretty...
Guest Post: Let’s Change the Conversation About Women Directors
A few weeks ago, as Jane Campion’s TV series Top Of The Lake drew to a close, Marie Claire UK wrote an article entitled ’11 facts about the director that will blow your mind’ where the...
Men Directed 85% of TV Shows Last Season
Here’s a sucky statistic brought to you by the Director’s Guild of America: men directed 85% of all TV episodes last season. These stats include all network and cable scripted TV...
Women Created 26 Percent of the Television Shows in the 2011–2012 Season
As we get ready to launch the new television season the statistics are out for how women fared last season behind the scenes in the TV business. According to the Center for Study of Women in...
Women Directors Are Way More Successful in the Indie World
As we embark on the fall festival season, Dr. Martha M. Lauzen has published another one of her vitally important studies tracking the progress of women working behind the scenes on movies. In...
Cross Post: Women Writing Pilots — Nice Work if You Can Get It
Last week the networks announced the pilots they are picking up to series from among the ninety or so that were produced this year for ABC, CBS, CW, FOX and NBC. Certainly the relative success that...
Cross-Post — Cannes: Festival Opens in a Boys Own Adventure
There are rumbles around the world about the lack of women directors in the official competition. Dr. Lisa French adds an Australian perspective. The `Festival de Cannes` opened with the usual...
Females Grossly Underrepresented and Misrepresented in Top Grossing Films of 2011
New stats are out from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. This time the research takes a look at the amount of female characters onscreen in the top grossing 100 films...
MPAA Data Shows Women and Men Each Buy Half the Movie Tickets Sold
For the second year in a row the MPAA has released data showing that men and women each buy half the tickets to movies. (Here’s the post of the 2010 stats.) Two years ago women bought more than...
Cross Post: Streep Speaks and Illuminates the Need for More Female Critics
Earlier this week, Terry Gross broadcast a provocative interview with Meryl Streep on her NPR program Fresh Air. The interview was tied to Streep’s unprecedented 17th Oscar nomination for her...
Top Grossing Women Centric Films of 2011
When I read that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo crossed the $100 million mark, it reminded me to take a look at how women centric films did last year. One film — Twilight- Breaking Dawn is...
What Bigelow Effect? Number of Women Directors in Hollywood Falls to 5 Percent
The Oscar nominations this morning give us another year where there are no women directors included in the list. This year we won’t see Kathryn Bigelow up on the stage giving out the best director...
DGA Stats on Directing TV Show A White Male Dominated World
The DGA released a report this week on who directs TV shows and the news is abominably bad for women and people of color. Of the 2,600 episodes analyzed of scripted series for the 2010–2011 season...
Women Lose Ground as TV Writers
TV is supposed to be better than the movies for women creatives. It is supposed to be the place where women are taken seriously because we watch TV and we buy the things that are advertised on TV. TV...
Guest Post: We Want More Female-Written Plays! by Katherine Bowman
The Los Angeles Female Playwrights Initiative (LA FPI) recently conducted a study on the number of female-written plays produced in LA. The number is a disappointing yet unsurprising 20%. In...
Only One African American Woman Directed a Top Grossing Film in 2008
When you see these numbers it shows the difficult road women of color directors have ahead of them, but at least we have some numbers to looks at. Dr. Stacy Smith and Marc Choueiti recently released...
New Study from Quebec Finds Female Directors Face Tough Road Getting Films Made
A new study released last week by Anna Lupien and Francine Descarries, researchers at the Université du Québec à Montréal in partnership with the Réalisatrices équitables an association of...
Who Goes to the Movies? Moviegoers Stats from 2010
The annual look at who went to the movies from the MPAA has been released. Here are the relevant stats. Women and men go to the movies in equal numbers. In 2010 women bought 50% of the tickets and...
The Numbers Speak For Themselves
This is day two of crappy stats about women in the creative business — this time, the literary world. An organization named VIDA — Women in Literary Arts — has released a very...
The Celluloid Ceiling Just Keeps Getting Higher and Higher
Groundhog Day might be tomorrow, but it sure feels like today with the release of the new Celluloid Ceiling Study from Dr. Martha Lauzen Executive Director, Center for the Study of Women in...
Text of Theresa Rebeck Laura Pels Keynote Address
Last night I saw someone do something very brave. My friend, Theresa Rebeck, a very successful playwright, TV writer and novelist, got up in front of a group of theatre people and talked about...
Guess What? Women Buy More Movie Tickets Than Men
You know that whole conversation about how women don’t go to the movies and are not a film market? You know that conversation that we hear over and over as the big reason why we are inundated with...