Independent Film Slowly Moves Toward Gender Parity, Study Finds
Independent film has always been seen as faster to give opportunities to people who are historically excluded, and a new report from San Diego State’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film indicates that continues to be the case.
In Indie Women, the center surveyed 754 features screened at 20 major American film festivals this year and found that the ratio of narrative films directed exclusively by women and men, respectively, is now seven to 10, up from six to 10 a year ago. Documentaries reached gender parity in the director’s chair for the first time since the center began tracking women’s festival representation in 2008. Across key crew positions (directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors and cinematographers), women worked more in docs (44 percent) than in narrative features (35 percent). Unsurprisingly, movies directed by women were more likely also to have women in other behind-the-scenes roles (30 percent of cinematographers and 48 percent of editors on woman-helmed films, as opposed to 12 percent and 22 percent, respectively, on pictures directed by men).
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By contrast, women occupied only 22 percent of key crew positions among last year’s 100 highest-grossing movies, most of which came from the studio system. “For years, industry observers have anticipated that the larger numbers of women working on independent features would eventually result in significantly higher numbers of women working on top-grossing features,” the center’s executive director, Martha M. Lauzen, said in a statement. “While the percentages of women working in some roles on larger-budget films have increased slightly, we are still waiting for that surge to occur.”
Indie Women also analyzed gender representation among film composers. Documentaries again had a higher share of women (26 percent) than narrative film did (16 percent), but the indie system overall employed more women as composers (20 percent) than the sample of 100 popular films (9 percent).
Overall, the center has examined more than 116,400 credits on more than 10,900 films from 2008 to 2023, including 11,094 credits and 754 films this year.
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