Progress for Women in Hollywood Has Stalled. Can It Get Back on Track?

With Women’s History Month well underway, Variety asked female leaders in Hollywood a simple question: Are we better off today than we were five years ago? More pointedly, how many gains have there really been in the battle for gender equality since the industry’s great #MeToo reckoning – and what is the outlook for further change?

Lately, there have been mixed signals: Time’s Up faded away in January after a series of missteps, and high-profile female Oscar contenders ended up empty handed once again in traditionally male-dominated categories earlier this month. Harvey Weinstein is in jail but new reports of sexual misconduct by other men in positions of authority continue to pop up with unsettling frequency. Recent academic studies have not given those fighting for gender equality much to cheer about either.

Women’s advocates surveyed by Variety concede that progress appears to have slowed recently but insist there is no need to despair. Their collective wisdom: Change can come in fits and starts.

“Yes, it’s improving. And yes, it’s really slow,” says Stephanie Allain, president of the Producers Guild, who helped birth “Boyz N the Hood” as a studio exec and has credits including “Dear White People” and the upcoming “Exorcist” sequel. From her vantage, progress for women has stalled recently, but, as someone who has worked to increase diversity in Hollywood for decades, she takes that in stride.

“We’ve kind of flatlined over the last year or two, but that’s what happens: you make a little progress, you are kind of stagnant, and then you make some more progress,” says Allain, who pushed to disclose diversity breakdowns during her stint as a director of the L.A. Film Festival and has long worked with organizations such as Women in Film and its ReFrame initiative for equal gender opportunity in showbiz. “So I’m still mad as hell, but we’re going in the right direction.”

If pressed, Anita Hill will allow that there have been some encouraging signs of progress during the past five years. But the chair of the Hollywood Commision, a coalition formed in late 2017 to fight discrimination and sexual misconduct on the job, believes that recent accountability for some high-profile abusers like Weinstein only goes so far.

It’s not at all clear to Hill that “everyday people” in the industry are facing the same type of accountability as the bigger names, for example. Her goal is to change that, and a culture that has historically condoned, or even joked about such behavior in the workplace, be it on the casting couch or elsewhere. 

“I don’t want to be satisfied with greater awareness,” says Hill, who famously testified before Congress in 1991 about sexual harassment she received in the public sector. “Our hope is at the Hollywood Commission really has been and will continue to be institutional change that will stand the test of time.”

And this, she freely admits, is not an easy task. The commission is in the process of analyzing its latest survey of women in the entertainment industry and has been working with coalition partners from the studios, streamers and guilds to develop programs and initiatives. Its latest report will likely come out in a couple months (“We’re focused on making sure what we report out is right,” she says) while two initiatives are planned for this year.  

The first, targeted for launch later this summer, is intended to make it easier for workers across the Hollywood ecosystem to report sexual harassment or abuse on the job. The second, expected later this year, is called Respect on Set, and is designed for smaller productions that lack the resources of larger outfits.

“I noticed that very early on that some people were falling through the cracks,” Hill says. “And what I heard over and over early on was, ‘I don’t know where to go.’”

The Producers Guild launched a more limited program for indie productions in late 2018, but it has been underutilized so far, according to national executive director Susan Sprung, who believes greater awareness of it could help. On the PGA’s behalf, she has been working with Hill’s commission to develop Respect on the Set, which will extend beyond individual productions themselves.

The reporting protocol also takes an expansive approach to the problem: It is designed to provide resources for women who may not immediately want to report sexual misconduct on the job in addition to those that do.

“Hollywood is very complicated because of all the different organizations and interests,” Hill says. “This is not a problem that is going to respond to a simple fix.”

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The picture is a little brighter on the parity front – especially in certain segments of TV production. According to the DGA’s latest research, 38% of all TV episodes in the 2020-21 season were directed by women, a healthy 81% gain from the 21% found in the 2016-17 pre-#MeToo reckoning season. It’s even more dramatically up from the single digits when DGA board president Lesli Linka Glatter started her directing career decades ago.

Back then, people would unabashedly say, “We hired a woman once and it didn’t work,” the director of shows including “Homeland” and the upcoming “Love & Death” recalls. Since then, the employment climate for female directors has “changed drastically, and that is really good,” says Glatter. “We’re moving the right direction but there’s much more to be done.”

However, opportunities in film directing and key behind-the-scenes jobs for women on theatrical movies remains ripe for improvement. According to the latest Celluloid Ceiling Report by Dr. Martha Lauzen, founder and executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, women comprised 24% of directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors and cinematographers working on the top 250 grossing U.S. films in 2022. That figure represents a slight tick downward from the 25% registered in 2021 and a 6% gain overall since 2017. When Lauzen began the study 25 years ago in 1998, the figure was 17%, and upon the January release of the latest findings, she said “one would expect more substantial gains” given the attention to the issue during the period.

USC Annenberg’s Inclusion Initiative also released a sobering study about directors in January, reporting that of the 111 directors hired to make the 100 top-grossing movies in 2022, just 9% were women, 3.7% points below 2021.

USC’s group also released a comprehensive gender breakdown of the Academy Awards this year, finding that 17% of the 13,253 Oscar nominees since 1929 were women and 83% were men — a ratio of five to one in men’s favor. Eight women have been nominated for the coveted directing trophy and three have gone home with the gold; remarkably, two of those wins came back-to-back in the 2021 and 2022 ceremonies. This year, no women (or men of color, for that matter) were nominated.

There were hopes that “Elvis” cinematographer Mandy Walker might become the first woman win a cinematography Oscar after she became the first woman to scoop up the ASC precursor award, but BAFTA winner James Friend prevailed instead for his work on “All Quiet on the Western Front.” Only three women have been nominated for a cinematography Oscar so far. 

According to Lauzen’s latest report, women comprised a mere 7% of cinematographers on the top 250 U.S. films last year, up 1% from 2021 and 3% from 2017. Female lensers had the worst showing in key behind the scenes roles last year, with female producers claiming the highest mark at 31%, a slight dip from the 2021 (+6% from 2017). That group was followed by exec producers at 25% (another 1% drop; +6% from 2017) and writers with a 2% increase to 19% (+8% from 2017).

“The reality is, parity means 50-50 and we’re not close,” says Amy Baer, board president of Women in Film. “We’ve made improvements in the C-suites, we’ve made improvements at the agencies, we’ve made improvements at the networks, at the studios, certainly in production, streamers, etc. But we’re not even close,” she stresses.

WIF, now 50, has been mentoring women for decades, and continues to work on gender equality with its ReFrame initiative going forward. Major media companies have their own diversity and inclusion efforts, as do the guilds.

What else is Hollywood doing to boost female representation? Oscar diversity requirements approved in 2020 go into effect this season and stipulate that best picture candidates meet inclusion thresholds by meeting two of four standards, with women considered an underrepresented group. One standard applies to storytelling and casting, while others focus on the ethnic and gender makeup of those behind the scenes, training and marketing roles.

Skeptics question how much these requirements will move the needle for women and other underrepresented groups. But at the very least they are bound to foster greater awareness of staffing and storytelling choices.

And even critics of Time’s Up praise it for raising awareness of gender issues during its short five years of existence. “Nobody promised us or nobody even coming into the arena thought that it was going to be easy, or that it was going to happen overnight,” says Hill. “That’s just not realistic. But the work continues, even though it does seem like a huge problem.”

Glatter, daughter of a labor union organizer, vows she will continue to use her megaphone as a DGA board leader to fight for gender issues, and the need for diversity in general. “I’m a tough old broad, and I will never give up working on this until we don’t have to discuss it,” she says.

“I’m really glad that the industry has taken this seriously, because for many years, it didn’t feel like it.”