Jamie Lee Curtis and Quentin Tarantino will be present at the 2023 Golden Globes

Two new studies have found that in 2022, Hollywood represented women and people of color less than the year before.

Diversity in Hollywood declined in 2022, according to two new studies. The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that fewer women and people of color made significant films than the previous year. A second study, from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, also noted the decline in the number of female directors, and further found that the percentage of women working in other behind-the-scenes roles is lower than in 2021.

This regression comes at a time when Hollywood has come under pressure to provide more opportunities for women, people of color and artists from other marginalized communities. In 2020, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced new diversity and inclusion standards for Best Picture eligibility. The standards addressed on-screen themes, creative leadership, industry access, and audience development, and required the inclusion of women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and people with cognitive disabilities. or physical or who are deaf or hard of hearing. There are, however, signs that the results are not as expected, such as the fact that female directors and screenwriters were all but excluded from Golden Globe nominations last month.

The USC Annenberg study, titled “ Inclusion in the Director’s Chair looked at the gender and ethnicity of the directors of last year’s 100 highest-grossing films. Only 9% were women, down 12.7% from 2021, and just 2.7% were women of color (according to variety). This tiny proportion included some of the highest rated films of the year: till of Chinonye Chukwu and The Woman King by Gina Prince-Bythewood. Black, Asian, Hispanic or Latino, or multiracial directors also fell, from 27.3% in 2021 to 20.7%. Among them, Ryan Coogler, who directed Black Panther: Wakanda Foreverand Jordan Peele for Boop. According to the study, there were 3.8 white directors for every underrepresented director.

” Many people have traditions when looking at the year past and the year ahead.said Dr. Stacy L. Smith, founder of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, in a statement. At the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, it seems our tradition is to lament how little has changed for women and people of color behind the camera in popular films. We would like to see not only the tradition change, but also the hiring practices that continue to marginalize women and people of color as directors. »

The SDSU study, titled “ The Celluloid Ceiling focused on a larger group of films, the 250 highest-grossing films. They found similar results for directors: 11% were women in 2022, compared to 12% in 2021 and 16% in 2020. Additionally, the study found that over the 25 years of tracking directors, screenwriters , producers, executive producers, editors and cinematographers in the sector, the representation of women had only increased by 7 percentage points, from 17% in 1998 to 24% in 2022.

The SDSU study also found that diversity breeds more diversity in Hollywood. ” Films directed by at least one woman employ significantly more women in other key behind-the-scenes roles than films directed exclusively by men “, says the report. More specifically, in films directed by women, they represented 53% of screenwriters (compared to 12% in films directed by men), 39% of editors (compared to 19% in films directed by men), 19 % of directors of photography (compared to 4% in films directed by men) and 18% of composers (compared to 6% in films directed by men).

Andrea Marks

Translated by the editor