Hollywood Faces Stark Reality: Women’s Depiction Behind the Camera Declines
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A new study reveals a troubling setback in Hollywood’s efforts to achieve gender parity, with women holding just 13% of director positions on the top 250 films of last year – a 3-percentage-point decrease from 2024.
The findings, released Thursday by the Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film at san Diego State University, paint a grim picture for women working behind the scenes in the film industry. The report, titled “The Celluloid Ceiling: Employment of Behind-the-Scenes Women on Top Grossing U.S. Films,” comes as Hollywood navigates challenges including the aftermath of the Los Angeles wildfires,declining production levels,and the recent losses of prominent filmmakers.
Decades of Tracking, Minimal Change
For nearly three decades, researcher Martha M. lauzen and her team have meticulously tracked the employment of women in key behind-the-scenes roles – directors, writers, executive producers, producers, editors, and cinematographers – analyzing data from over 3,500 film credits. Lauzen initially embarked on this research in 1998, operating under the assumption that simply highlighting the disparity would spur change. Though,as she noted in an interview,”The numbers are remarkably stable. They’ve been remarkably stable for more than a quarter of a century.”
Despite numerous calls to action and even a brief federal investigation, the overall percentage of women working in thes roles on the 250 top-grossing films remained at 23% in 2025, mirroring the figures from 2024 and 2020. While there has been some incremental progress in the number of female directors – rising from 7% in 1998 to 13% last year – the gains have proven fragile.
A Disparate Landscape Across Roles
The study reveals a deeply uneven distribution of opportunities. In 2025, women comprised 28% of film producers and 23% of executive producers. However, representation among screenwriters lagged significantly, with only 20% being women.The role of editor also showed minimal improvement, with women holding 20% of positions – the same level recorded in 1998.
perhaps the moast concerning decline was observed among cinematographers, where women held a mere 7% of influential roles last year, a sharp drop from the 12% recorded in 2024. The cinematographer, responsible for the visual style and feel of a film, remains a heavily male-dominated field.
political and Economic Headwinds
The stagnation in representation coincides with a shifting political landscape and industry-wide instability. A decade after the U.S. Equal Employment Prospect Commission began investigating alleged gender discrimination in Hollywood,the effort yielded limited results. the 2015 review, prompted by the American Civil Liberties Union, failed to gain significant traction.
The return of President Trump to office less than a year ago has further complicated matters, with an immediate call to end diversity and inclusion programs. Trump’s appointee as Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, has abolished diversity programs within the agency and initiated investigations into the hiring practices of major media companies like Walt Disney Co. and Comcast, arguing that such programs disadvantage white people.
Paramount, now under the leadership of David ellison, recently agreed to dismantle it’s diversity and inclusion programs as a condition for securing FCC approval for the Ellison family’s takeover of the company.
Industry Consolidation Adds to Uncertainty
Adding to the precarious situation, the film industry is undergoing a period of intense consolidation. Warner Bros. Finding has agreed to sell its film and television studios,HBO,and HBO Max to Netflix in an $82.7-billion deal. However, Paramount is challenging this arrangement with a unfriendly takeover bid for warner Bros.
“Consolidation now hangs over the film industry like a guillotine, with job losses likely and the future of the theatrical movie-going experience in question,” Lauzen wrote in her report. “Add the current political war on diversity,and women in the film industry now find themselves in uncharted territory.” She added, “Hollywood has never needed permission to exclude or diminish women, but the industry now has it.”
Lauzen expressed uncertainty about the future findings of her research,acknowledging that the confluence of political headwinds and industry upheaval has created an unprecedented and potentially detrimental habitat for women seeking opportunities behind the camera.
