Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/616158
J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 6 I 3 • Caucasian males: 82.4%; • Minority males: 11.2%; • Caucasian females: 5.1%; and • Minority females: 1.3% "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. Unfortunately, we don't have a metric for that." said DGA President Paris Barclay. "What you will see is what happens when industry employers— studios and production companies—do little to address this issue head on. The DGA, by detailing the state of director hiring with the precision of our data, hopes to draw further attention to this serious matter so that industry employers can develop concrete director diversity plans." To best serve as a representation of the industry and account for inconsistencies in a single production or distribution cycle, this first report is a two-year study analyzing the films that were released in 2013 and 2014 2 . The report does not include foreign films, documentaries, animated films and re-releases. The 347 features studied were produced by companies (which range from the major studios and their subsidiaries to smaller production companies) that are signatory to the DGA's collective bargaining agreement—together, they accounted for approximately 97% percent of the total domestic live-action box office 3 . While not the focus of the study, the DGA also analyzed films produced by companies that are not signatory to DGA's collective bargaining agreement and found that hiring of women directors followed a similar pattern in both groups. Comparison by Box Office 4 The DGA conducted further analysis to better understand whether barriers grew for women and ethnically diverse directors as the size of a project increased. In the absence of publicly available data on the budgets for each of the features covered in the report, the DGA studied the percentage of women and minority directors based on a film's box office—a key indicator of project size, number of theatrical screens and studio marketing support. Titles were divided into two categories: 1) those with a box office between $250k and $10 million, a range which generally represents lower budget and/or independent films that had national releases, and 2) those with a box office greater than $10 million, generally representing films that had significant commercial releases and larger budgets. The findings suggest that women face significant barriers to employment as directors of high-budget, wide-release projects. DGA Publishes Inaugural Feature Film Diversity Report Two-Year Study Reveals: Women Account For Only 6.4% of Film Directors—Dropping to Just 3% for Major Box Office Titles On December 9, the DGA released its inaugural Feature Film Diversity Report analyzing the gender and ethnicity of feature film directors. Of the 376 directors of features released in 2013 and 2014, just 6.4% were women and just 12.5% were minority directors. A further breakdown by gender and ethnicity follows. (continued)