ASK & DISCUSS INDEX

11 years, 9 months ago - Daniel Cormack

I clicked on this as I thought there might be an intelligent, reasoned take on the issue, but that's not what I found, unfortunately.

"1. The number of women directors is so small because women are not really interested in directing and few women are exceptional enough to do a man’s job."

I'm pretty sure that self-selection is a factor, which is probably also why males are so few and far between in wardrobe and make-up (with the possible exception of SFX make-up). Naturally, with a smaller pool of interested females, you're going to have a smaller absolute number of exceptional individuals, even if the ratio of exceptional talent is the same as for men, as you might reasonably expect. I've never met anyone who has even implied that women are inherently less likely to be exceptional directors as the point seems to want to insinuate they do.

As for the quote of 3,500 female DGA members it fails to regard the fact that the DGA also includes Assistant Directors and other roles and that there is by no means an automatic, logical or even desirable progression from AD to director. In my experience, the AD role is far more logistical than creative so a great AD would not necessarily make a great director. I would balk slightly at an AD whose professed ambition was to be a director and it would certainly raise a series of questions and concerns in my mind.


"2. The ratio of women directors is improving—it’s just going to take time."

Again this is a perfectly reasonable thesis and I believe it has some truth in it: certainly no evidence has been presented to disprove it. The point about cinema being over a century old is pretty specious as clearly the condition of women up until at least the 1960s onwards simply would not have facilitated anything like a representative amount of women into the role, which is undeniably an historical wrong. Even if you look now at the role of director, you can be pretty sure if you dig out the stats that on average directors are more heavily weighted to the higher age ranges - becoming a director of a feaure film is more usually a culmination of the career in the industry, rather than something achieved at young age, with the exception of a few young guns. So if the stats show that directors are statistically bunched in, say, their 40s, 50s and 60s then these are people whose education and expectations were formed somewhere between the 1950s and 1970s - a time of vastly different attitudes and pressures vis a vis women. The position of women in society has improved vastly even in my own lifetime, ie from the 1980s onwards.

You would expect some of this effect to filter through, but not immediately. If the stats show that women in their twenties now are breaking through at a lower rate then men, then this might support the argument, but no such evidence has been presented.

Gosh, this has gone on longer than I thought so will return to address the other points later.