The U.S. Senate is far from achieving gender equality: just 25 percent of senators are women. Yet it’s a progressive haven for women compared to Hollywood, as a new social media campaign stresses. Guerrilla Girls and the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film have teamed up on the “Then and Now” campaign to not only spotlight show business’ continued exclusion of women directors, but to compare how Hollywood and the Senate have changed — or haven’t — in the past 20 years.
In 1999 Guerrilla Girls launched a public awareness campaign comparing women’s representation in the Senate to that of Hollywood’s top directors. Back then nine percent of senators and four percent of directors on the year’s top films were women. Now women are a quarter of the Senate, but still only four percent of directors on 2018’s top films.
“The intent of the campaign is to illustrate that 20 years later, the film industry continues to lag behind even our most staid political institutions,” explained Dr. Martha Lauzen, executive director of the Center. “The side-by-side comparison offers a way of conceptualizing how little Hollywood has changed over the last two decades. While numerous media outlets dubbed 2018 the ‘year of the women’ due to the upsurge in the numbers of women who ran for and won political office, the same can’t be said for the employment of women as film directors.”
Check out the campaign below. You can also find it on Guerrilla Girls’ website, Twitter, and Instagram, as well as on the Center’s website.