If I was a female writer now I’d think there was no opportunity. If I was a female writer and looked at the stats and looked at the stats again, at what’re the chances of getting your projects into production? You’d almost want to give up there and then. I mean what are your chances? You may as well play the lottery. (Colin, employer )

I open with this evocative quote from one of my research participants as it so clearly illustrates the situation that inspired this book. Women still stand far less a chance than men of becoming the screenwriter of a film. The numbers are so dismal, and seem so stubbornly averse to change, that the women who succeed feel as rare and exceptional as lottery winners. I first became aware of the disparity in 2005 when I was working as Senior Development Executive for the UK Film Council (UKFC), then the UK government’s strategic and funding body for the film industry. All the concern and effort to ‘diversify’ the film workforce at that time was focused on race and disability—inequalities that are no less of a problem today. But when I raised the issue of gender inequality, I was confronted with a post-feminist discourse from some of the senior management, suggesting that women had equal opportunities to men and no longer faced any barriers at work. In the years since then, the position of women in film has now become widely recognized as unfair and unequal. A still developing global conversation is happening in which issues like unequal pay, unconscious bias , and sexual harassment in the film labour market have become headline news, backed up by numbers showing the entrenched nature of gender inequality in many key filmmaking roles. This has happened, in no small part, due to various campaigners and data gatherers worldwide, but—and partly in response to this—in the film labour market, gender inequality is still often discounted or presumed to be improving, as it was in my interviews:

I feel like it’s less of a kind of situation than it was five or ten or certainly twenty years ago. (Vanessa, Employer)

This attitude is typical of a ‘progress narrative’, identified by Christine Everingham, Deborah Stevenson, and Penny Warner-Smith (2007). It describes a common assumption in discussions of gender inequality that ‘things are changing’, as actor Annette Bening claimed at the opening of the 2017 Venice Film Festival, despite there being only one film directed by a woman in competition at the festival (Keslassy 2017). With so much attention on the subject, and high-profile pressure, why have so many schemes and gendered opportunities failed to shift the overall inclusion of women in filmmaking? This book seeks to address this problem and dig deep into the causes of gender inequality in screenwriting work, giving scholars, decision makers, and campaigners the tools to ensure that future action is based on profound knowledge of the film labour market and, therefore, make real change a possibility.

There are now plenty of data to indicate substantial and continued underemployment of everyone except white, able-bodied, cis-presenting men in film work. The data are patchy, and until very recently, as part of the work I’m doing with Shelley Cobb and Linda Ruth Williams at Southampton University (which I will detail later), the data have been mainly Hollywood facing. So let’s start with the numbers that we have, since they provide a clear and undeniably grim overview of what women are up against. Ann Oakley (1999) has argued that without quantitative data, ‘It is difficult to distinguish between personal experience and collective oppression. Only large-scale comparative data can determine to what extent the situations of men and women are structurally differentiated.’ This has been particularly helpful in garnering support for the cause of gender inequality in film work, as Shelley Cobb and I (Wreyford and Cobb 2017) have argued elsewhere.

New data from the project ‘Calling the Shots: Women and Contemporary UK Film Culture, 2000–2015’¹ (CTS ) (Cobb et al. 2016) show that women made up 20 per cent of the screenwriters of British films in production in 2015. Just 13 per cent of all 203 films qualifying as British in 2015 had a woman screenwriter, and less than 2 per cent of all the screenwriters in 2015 were women of colour. The percentage of women working as screenwriters of British films in production has only increased two points since 2003—the first year for which project partner, the British Film Institute (BFI), could provide us with a list of qualifying films. Even this tiny increase may be misleading. Across all the categories we are researching and throughout the intervening years, the inclusion of women goes up or down slightly year on year, but always hovers around the same percentage (Cobb et al. 2018).

In May 2018, the Writer’s Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) published a report on screenwriters in film and television work, in association with The Author’s Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) (Kreager and Follows 2018). Looking at films and television programmes between 2005 and 2016, the report found that only 15 per cent of films had a woman screenwriter, while just 11 per cent of films were written predominantly by women, and in television, only 28 per cent of episodes were written by women. They also found that women screenwriters were less likely to have sustainable careers, with men 39 per cent more likely than women to write a second feature film and just 8 per cent of writers with four or more film credits being women.

The data that we compiled for CTS closely (and deliberately) echo the work done by Martha M. Lauzen (2018), at the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, San Diego State University. In her ‘Celluloid Ceiling’ reports, she has been looking at the presence of women behind the 250 highest grossing films every year since 1998 and in doing so has built up a much-needed body of evidence that not only are women under-represented in most key professions in film but that the situation is not changing. Slight increases in the percentages of writers, directors, producers, and other key roles in any year are all too often followed by slight decreases the following year, and overall, there is a sense that one or two successful women can alter the results in any given year, but in general, the industry is not ready to make changes to the level of women’s involvement. Table 1.1 highlights some of the data from both projects. These comparisons show how little movement there is in the numbers in both studies. The slightly higher numbers from CTS reflect the fact that these data are based on films in production, whereas the Celluloid Ceiling report focuses on films that have been released. There is very likely a drop-off for women screenwriters between production and distribution, just as there is between development and production (Sinclair et al. 2006).