Setting aside this year’s unofficial salute to women directors by the Cannes Film Festival, attention has focused recently on their “widespread exclusion” from directing in film and television by the American Civil Liberties Union.
In a 15-page letter last week to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the ACLU cited “systemic failure to hire women directors in violation of Title VII,” and it urged the federal agency to reopen a decades-old investigation into Hollywood hiring practices.
“Women directors are subjected to discriminatory practices, including recruiting practices that exclude them, failure to hire qualified women directors based on overt sex stereotyping and implicit bias, and the use of screening mechanisms that have the effect of shutting women out,” said the group, which provides legal assistance in cases where it considers civil liberties to be at risk.
The ACLU cited numerous statistics, including that women directed only 4.1 percent of the 1,300 top-grossing films from 2002-2014, and 14 percent of more than 220 television shows in 2013-2014.
“Such statistically severe gender bias in this important industry is a civil rights problem worthy of the Commission’s serious renewed attention,” said the group, which also cited its own survey of 50 women directors.
In the 1960s, the EEOC held hearings on equal opportunity for both women and people of color in film and television, and requested that the Department of Justice litigate to combat discrimination in the entertainment sector, the ACLU said.
The hearings identified barriers facing women and people of color, including their exclusion from “rosters,” or lists, of eligible employees, compounded by their exclusion from craft and trade unions and guilds. The Justice Department entered into settlement agreements with the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers, as well as a number of unions, the ACLU said. Women were not included, however, because there were too few of them in the work force to begin with.
The EEOC, which helped to monitor compliance with the agreements, ceased to do so after 1976, the ACLU said.
Efforts by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, meanwhile, to investigate and monitor several major studios during that same decade “did not specifically address discrimination against women directors, nor did they create significant long-term improvements in hiring bias in the industry,” the ACLU said.
“Decades have passed and gender disparities remain as stark as they were in the 1970s,” concluded the letter, written by Melissa Goodman, director of the LGBTQ, Gender & Reproductive Justice Project of the ACLU of Southern California.
In Europe, where the 68th Festival de Cannes is unfolding, 16.3 percent of movies from 2003 to 2011 were directed by women, according to the Federation of European Film Directors. Agnès Varda, who directed “Vagabond” and “The Gleaners and I,” was slated to become the first woman to receive an honorary Palme d’Or.
