From comments by Jennifer Lawrence and Amanda Seyfried about wage gaps to Patricia Arquette’s Oscars speech and Rose McGowan getting fired for acknowledging sexist casting calls, it’s evident that Hollywood still has a problem with how it treats female actors.
According to Variety, there’s a new study from the Center For The Study Of Women In Television And Film, and results for gender equality are arguably even worse for women behind the camera. In 2014, 85 percent of films had no female directors, 80 percent had no female writers, 33 percent had no female producers, 78 percent had no female editors, and 92 percent had no female cinematographers.
Furthermore, the findings break apart an increasing gender gap between the top 700 films of the year, and the 250 films that are the top-grossing. For instance, women directors helmed 13 percent of the top 700 films, but for the top 250 films, that number goes down to 7 percent—or 17 films annually. Of course it doesn’t help that when it comes to gender or racial diversity, as much as white guys kind of get it, in actuality many of them still don’t.
Given the internet’s reputation for rational, sympathetic attitudes towards equal rights, we can expect a range of responses and counterarguments. Issues like the median wealth of female actresses relative to working-class Americans, an inability to simultaneously support racial and gender equality, complacent appreciation of anemic progress-to-date, and wanting social justice warriors to just shut up already, will all be trotted out as reasonable arguments to continue observing the problem without bothering to actually do something about it.