GENDER EQUALITY IN CINEMA

Have you ever been asked about famous directors? What would happen if we did? If we asked you to make a list, how many women would be in it? You probably would think of Stanley Kubrick, Wes Anderson, Tarantino… and that’s completely fine but why is it that no women or almost no women come to our minds?

For many years this society has not accounted for women's achievements and the film industry has been no exception. That is why to understand nowadays’ situation we must understand the past and hope for a better and more equal future.

Source: Variety

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN CINEMA

Source: Glamour

Throughout the history of cinema, a lot of important female figures have been omitted and only male ones have appeared in textbooks. However, there has been a considerable quantity of women that had an impact in cinema. Back then, movies were about a minute long and they showed daily moments. Nevertheless, it was already considered cinema and some people had experimented with it, among them there were a bunch of women.

complete success and thanks to that Azner started her career as a director. Her movies were considered brave and law breaking because they broke all sexist stereotypes of Hollywood. In fact, at that time the only women that worked in the industry were the ones that cutted and mounted the films. Back then, that part of the process of a movie was considered to be for females because of its similarity with knit.

Regarding current female directors, Kathryn Bigelow, creator of The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, Detroit or Point Break among others, has managed to conquer Hollywood. In fact, not only has she been one of the few women who has ever been nominated for the Oscar for the best direction but she's also one of the few that has won it.

A genre in which nowadays there is not as much lack of equality is in horror movies. Somehow, the quantity of women working on this type of films (directing, acting…) is more generous than in any other genre, for instance, Crudo (Julia Ducournau), The Babadook (Jennifer Kent), The invitation (Karyn Kusama), The Love Witch (Anna Biller)... are all directed by women.

Alice Guy

Alice Guy-Blaché was one of the forgotten female figures in cinema. As some of you may know, it wasn’t until the 1900s that the term fictional cinema emerged and supposedly it was Méliès who invented it, in fact, he is considered the father of fantastic cinema and special effects. Well, in 1896 Alice had already started doing fictional cinema and she is considered the first female in history to do movies. Although at that time there weren’t a lot of facilities offered for women, her talent was something everybody was aware of and so she continued with her career.

Alice’s case is not the only one. In the 1930s there was only a single woman working at making movies in Hollywood, her name was Dorothy Azner. She started her career cutting and editing movies and it wasn’t until 1927 when she decided to direct her own movie called Fashions for Women. This film happened to be a

Agnès Varda

Some years later, in the 50s a woman called Agnès Varda made an impact in cinema too. She, one of the biggest influences in the movement of the french la Nouvelle Vague, didn't get the recognition for being the forerunner of it. She also released some films which served as examples for films that were created by men in the later years and unlike her, they did get recognition for their work.

Despite all, Agnès continued with her work (in fact, she released her latest films in 2017 and 2019) and has served as an inspiration for the famous director Isabel Coixet too. In her case, she has been creating films since the 80s and right now she is considered one of the best female directors from Europe. Coixet, the winner of 8 Goyas, always makes sure her directing team is composed of women. Moreover, most of the time Isabel tells stories starring women in her films. Thus, she has served as an inspiration for the director Carla Simón, the creator of Estiu 1993.

Isabel Coixet

Kathryn Bigelow

Carla Simón

HAS THE SITUATION IMPROVED?

As we can see in this video, nowadays there is still a lot to do if we want to achieve gender equality in the film industry. To improve that, some ideas are mentioned that may work in the future. There is also an interview with a university teacher in which some ideas and point of views are discussed.

On the other hand, regarding the study European Women’s Audiovisual Network (EWA) did from 2006 to 2013 we can see how there is still a lot to be improved. Here, we created a little graphic in order to make the interpretation of the information easier.

According to EWA, the percentage of women graduating in film schools was 44%, which leaves us with 56% of men graduating from the same type of schools. Next to it we can see how from all the people that graduated from the film schools only a 24% of women ended up working in the industry. Unlike female film-makers, the percentage of men working in the industry after graduating was 76%. All this means that even though there is an equality of genders graduating from film schools, when it comes to working in the field, men have a bigger presence.

WHICH COUNTRIES HAVE THE MOST EQUALITY?

A study made by Femmes de Cinéma in 2017 shows for each country the percentages of women and men working in the film industry . The data collected goes from 2012 to 2016. These countries showed in the graphic, are the top 10 countries with most women working in their industry. By 2016, Sweden was leading the chart with an average of 30% of women working, followed by Norway with an average of 29%. As for the worst numbers of the top 10 is Denmark with an average of 22,3% of women. The country with the worst numbers in Europe is Latvia with only 5% of the people in the industry being women.

COURAGEOUS COUNTRIES: ATTEMPTS OF IMPROVING

SWEDEN

A clear example of gender equality in the film industry is located in Sweden. In this European country, The Swedish Film Institute (SFI) makes sure that this initiative is taken into account in every project. For that, whenever somebody needs or wants to ask for funds to make the project happen, the SFI puts some conditions for the receivers. Among those conditions, one of them is to have a 50/50 percent ratio between men and women, this is, there has to be the same or almost the same quantity of men and women working in every field (editing, directing…).

This movement has had a clear impact in the country, for instance, in Sweden the presence of women in the industry has gone up to 49% by 2017. If we compare those numbers to the ones between 2006-2012 we can see how a change has been made. All this made it clear that the beliefs that said whenever more women were included in a project, its quality was going to be poorer were wrong. It also proved wrong those that thought or said that there could not be equality because of the lack of women qualified for the positions.

Alongside with all of that, more and more initiatives have been started, for instance a website called Nordic Women in Films and a programme called “Moviement”. The website’s goal is to give visibility to female film-makers. In the “Moviement” case, the main purpose is to “help women film-makers develop leadership skills and career strategies” (Unesco, 2020).

NORWAY

In the case of Norway, the collected data in 2018 showed an improvement in gender equality too. Here, when it came to main figures, this is, production support and development support in total, the percentage of women working in that section was 51%. Regarding key positions for projects which have been granted production support for cinema films, the percentage of female figures was 53%. Moreover, in comparison to 2017, an increase was found in short films too. Here the numbers went up from 55.6% to 60%.

Unluckily, there wasn't an improvement found in every type of project. In the case of documentaries a decrease of women’s presence happened compared to the numbers collected in 2017. 22% of the working stuff were women while a year back (in 2017) a 35% of the team was composed of women. This is the case of drama series too, here compared to 2017, there has been a decrease of female figures. The numbers went from 47.5% to 41.1%.

Here, in Film Me In, we want to raise awareness. So, if you find this topic interesting and you want to learn more about it, we recommend you listen to this podcast.