Long-term patterns of gender imbalance in an industry without ability or level of interest differences

Abstract

Female representation has been slowly but steadily increasing in many sectors of society. One sector where one would expect to see gender parity is the movie industry, yet the representation of females in most functions within the U.S. movie industry remain surprisingly low. Here, we study the historical patterns of female representation among actors, directors, and producers in an attempt to gain insights into the possible causes of the lack of gender parity in the industry. Our analyses reveals a remarkable temporal coincidence between the collapse in female representation across all functions and the advent of the Studio System, a period when the major Hollywood studios controlled all aspects of the industry. Female representation among actors, directors, producers and writers dropped to extraordinarily low values during the emergence and consolidation of the Studio System that in some cases have not yet recovered to pre-Studio System levels. In order to explore some possible mechanisms behind these patterns, we investigate the association between the gender balance of actors, writers, directors, and producers and a number of economic indicators, movie industry indicators, and movie characteristics. We find robust, strong, and significant associations which are consistent with an important role for the gender of decision makers on the gender balance of other industry functions. While in no way demonstrating causality, our findings add new perspectives to the discussions of the reasons for female under-representation in fields such as computer science and medicine, that have also experienced dramatic changes in female representation.

Race- and Gender-Based Underrepresentation of Creative Contributors: Art, Fashion, Film, and Music

“…Gender and racial/ethnic identities in film play a key role in shaping our society, and have the potential to amplify sexism and racism [32]. Diversity among film actors, directors, producers, writers, and other contributors has been lacking since the start of the film industry [33]. Moreover, since its inception, the film industry has been used to justify racial hierarchies and bolster white supremacy [34].…”

Race- and gender-based under-representation of creative contributors: art, fashion, film, and music

“…Gender and racial/ethnic identities in film play a key role in shaping our society, and have the potential to amplify sexism and racism (Eschholz et al, 2002 ). Diversity among film actors, directors, producers, writers, and other contributors has been lacking since the start of the film industry (Amaral et al, 2020 ). Moreover, since its inception, the film industry has been used to justify racial hierarchies and bolster white supremacy (Erigha, 2019 ).…”

Quantifying Award Network and Career Development in the Movie Industry

“…A typical example in show business is the Oscar award; winners in this event always attract tremendous attention all over the world and will get much more benefits in their future careers [7,8]. There are a large number of works trying to quantitatively understand the system dynamics and predict the behaviors of performers in the movie industry, for example, previous studies include exploring the dynamics of the movie industry [7,9,10], measuring the significance of creative work [11], predicting the movie ratings and success [12,13], the collaboration network analysis between performers [14,15], the gender disparities and age [16][17][18][19][20], and quantifying and predicting the career development for performers [15,21,22]. These sufficient works on the movie industry gave us a comprehensive picture of the film industry, however, there is still a lack of study focusing on film awards, especially putting all the famous film awards together.…”