Professor Martha M. Lauzen, Executive Director, Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film Professor School of Theatre, Television and Film San Diego State University, has released her latest "Boxed In" study of the 2010-2011 prime-time television season.

WGAW Issues 2011 Hollywood Writers Report Executive Summary

Latest Industry Stats Show Gap Widens for Minority and Women Film and Television Writers

LOS ANGELES -- The Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW) has released the Executive Summary of the 2011 Hollywood Writers Report: Recession and Regression. The study examines writers’ employment and earnings by ethnicity, gender, and age from 2008 through 2009 in the motion picture and television industry. As in previous years, diverse writers face significant obstacles to employment in Hollywood.

According to the report’s author Darnell Hunt, Ph.D., director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies and professor of sociology at UCLA, “From the initial project pitch to project completion, each phase of the production pipeline has the potential to serve as a barrier to or facilitator of increased diversity among industry writers. The WGAW is committed to working with the rest of the industry to ensure that the production pipeline is shaped less by the former and more by the latter. Diversity is not a luxury, not even in tough times. The Hollywood industry, in the final analysis, depends on increasingly diverse audiences and on the stories to which they can relate.”

Click HERE or on the link below for more details.

2011 Executive Summary (.pdf)

In a May 8, 2011 article on Deadine.com, Nikki Finke asks Neely Swanson, former SVP of Development for David E. Kelly Prodctions and current Adjunct Professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts about the market environment for women pilot writers.

CLICK HERE to read the entire article.

by Martha M. Lauzen, Ph.D.
Copyright © 2010 – All rights reserved.

In 2010, women comprised 16% of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films.  This represents a decline of 1 percentage point from 1998 and is even with 2009 figures.

Women accounted for 7% of directors in 2010, the same percentage as in 2009.  This figure represents a decline of two percentage points from 1998.

The following summary provides employment figures for 2010 and compares the most recent statistics with those from previous years.

Click HERE for the full article.