The University of Southern California conducted a study on the lack of diversity in Hollywood, and the results are staggering. Despite the notion that TV is doing rather well regarding racial and gender diversity, the study found that women made up less than a third of all TV writers, and less than a quarter of all show creators. For TV directors, the study only analyzed premieres and pilots. But the results still show that on broadcast networks, a whopping 90 percent of directors are white. Cable came in at 83 percent and streaming at 89 percent.
And, unsurprisingly, the film industry represents diversity even worse. The study shows that in film, women made up only 3 percent of film directors, and 10 percent of film writers. And film directors as a whole are 87 percent white.
Perhaps the most shocking statistic of the study was in the analysis of the speaking parts that appeared in 2014 studio films and live-action scripted TV shows from the 2014–15 season. As represented in this graph, the study concludes that of the 11,000 speaking roles in films that year, only one-third were female, and only 28 percent are nonwhite.
Then, when female characters did appear, they were more than three times as likely as men to be sexualized.
On the executive level, roughly 80 percent of those on boards of directors and executive management are male. USC also handed out an “inclusivity index” report for the corporations that make up the entertainment industry, most of which received a failing grade. The only bright spot was in television. “On the whole,” the study writers conclude, “inclusivity requires creating an ecosystem in which different perspectives hold value and stories represent the world in which we live.”
