ACLU Pushes for Probe of Alleged Bias Against Women in Hollywood

The American Civil Liberties Union is asking US and California civil-rights agencies to investigate alleged bias against women in the Hollywood film and TV industry. The organization’s Southern California chapter and the national ACLU Women’s Rights Project are providing data to the agencies that they say reveal dramatic disparities in the hiring of women directors in TV and on big-budget films. The ACLU also supplied anecdotal accounts from 50 women directors. “Blatant and extreme gender inequality in this large and important industry is shameful and unacceptable,” said Melissa Goodman, director of the ACLU SoCal’s LGBTQ, Gender & Reproductive Justice Project. “The time has come for new solutions to this serious civil-rights problem.”

The complaint was sent to agencies including the California Department of Fair Employment & Housing and the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It escalates recent criticism of Hollywood studios from women’s rights groups. Fahizah Alim, a spokeswoman at the California Department of Fair Employment & Housing, said agency staff “is in the process of reviewing the letter and its claims.” EEOC officials received the ACLU letter and “are carefully considering its contents,” said Christine Nazer, a spokeswoman. “It’s certainly been clear for years that women are terribly underrepresented as directors in Hollywood, and there’s no real reason for it,” said Bonnie Eskenazi, a partner specializing in entertainment litigation at Greenberg Glusker in Los Angeles. “It goes back to the kinds of biases that we as women face all the time when we’re trying to break through the glass ceiling and achieve positions of power.”