Studios Blamed in Directors Guild Study on Hiring of Women and Minority Filmmakers

The long established paucity of women directors in Hollywood has not only led to a federal investigation into gender discrimination, at the behest of the America Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), it has also spurred one of the industry’s most important groups to take aim at the discrepancy -- and take studios to task for failing to effect change.

On Dec 9, the Directors Guild of America, which has a membership of 16,000, released a study showing that 6.4 percent of the 376 features released in 2013 and 2014 were directed by women and 12.5 percent were from minority directors. It also looked at films released by the six major studios and five “mini-majors,” and tabulated the percentage of women and minority hires made by each over two years. “What this report does not reflect is what people who love film – even our culture as a whole – are missing when such a disproportionate percentage of films are directed by one gender or one ethnicity,” said the guild’s president, Paris Barclay. “Unfortunately, we don’t have a metric for that. What you will see is what happens when industry employers -- studios and production companies -- do little to address this issue head on.”