The highest-grossing movie of 2023 was directed by a woman – but equal opportunity for women behind the camera is as elusive as ever, caution San Diego State’s Martha Lauzen and Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s Stacy L. Smith.
The academics’ latest respective industry progress reports pour cold water on any premature celebrations prompted by the high-profile successes of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, the year’s top box office performer, and of Celine Song’s Past Lives, which received the highest Metacritic score.
While Annenberg’s “Inclusion in the Director’s Chair” surveys the 100 top-grossing movies annually and the SDSU Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film’s “The Celluloid Ceiling” additionally widens the aperture to the top 250 releases, both conclude that women consistently account for a slim minority of directors working each year. (The two reports’ exact numbers differ slightly: Among the top 100 films of 2023, Annenberg calculated that women represented 12.1 percent of helmers, while SDSU said the share was 14 percent.)
“Over more than a decade and a half, the percentage of women in top directing jobs has not even grown by 10 percentage points,” said Smith, whose group began keeping track in 2007, when the percentage of female helmers that year was 2.7 percent. Over the past 17 years, just 6 percent of the 1,769 directors behind the 1,700-movie sample were women. “These figures are not merely data points on a chart. They represent real, talented women working to have sustainable careers.”
Annenberg’s study also examines race/ethnicity and again found no significant improvement for inclusion of directors of color, which was 22.4 percent in 2023 and 15.7 percent across the past 17 years. Women of color fared worst of all. Four made a movie among the 100 theatrical releases: Song, The Marvels’ Nia DaCosta, Joy Ride’s Adele Lim and Wish’s Fawn Veerasunthorn (Eva Longoria’s Flamin’ Hot was a streaming release, so could not be included).
Over 17 years, just 19 women of color directed a top 100 movie – and theirs earned higher average and median Metacritic scores than movies directed by white men and women and men of color. In terms of distributor responsibility, Universal released the most movies directed by women (27) and Lionsgate the most helmed by directors of color (31), but no single distributor has released even five films directed by a woman of color over the past 17 years.
“For the companies and industry members who want to believe that the director problem is fixed, it is nowhere near solved,” said Smith, who last month announced Proof of Concept, a new accelerator fund with Cate Blanchett’s Dirty Films for short films about women, trans or non-binary people. “It’s essential to continue to press for change, and these numbers provide evidence of just how far there is to go.”
Lauzen’s annual report, which began in 1998, also examines women’s employment in other key behind-the-scenes roles including writers (19 percent among the top 100 movies of 2023), executive producers (22 percent), producers (24 percent), editors (20 percent), cinematographers (6 percent) and composers (12 percent). Across the 250 highest-grossing movies of the year, women occupied less than a quarter (22 percent) of these positions, which Lauzen put into context: “An increase of 5 percentage points over 26 years suggests a glacial rate of change and makes one seriously question industry pledges to achieve greater gender diversity.”
She noted that movies directed or co-directed by a woman were more likely to employ women in these other behind-the-scenes roles. For example, 26 percent of woman-helmed films had a female composer, as opposed to 11 percent of movies directed by men. “Generally speaking, when a woman directs a film, she brings a substantially different network of creatives with her than a male director would, intentionally or unintentionally,” Lauzen said.
Overall, 83 percent of 2023’s 250 highest-grossing movies were directed solely by men, while just 4 percent employed at least 10 women in key behind-the-scenes roles.
“It’s the ultimate illusion: Greta Gerwig’s well-deserved triumph belies the inequality that pervades the mainstream film industry,” Lauzen continued. “The numbers tell the story. Behind-the-scenes gender ratios in Hollywood remain dramatically skewed in favor of men.”
