Data Tells Us Why We Should All Care About Hollywood’s ‘Female Film Director Problem’
Female directors in the film industry are underrepresented and even though ‘Hollywood’s female director problem’ has been the source of discussion over the past years, there have been no major changes in the representation of female directors in the film industry. To narrow the gender gap, media companies simply have to start hiring more female film directors. Apart from the public discussion about women being underrepresented in the film industry, there is another incentive for media companies to narrow this gap: data shows that we prefer movies directed by women.
Existing research on the gender gap in the film industry is focused on the number of female film directors involved in the top 100 or top 1000 Hollywood movies in a specific year. Although these studies confirm the gender gap, they do not answer questions like: Is the gender gap narrowing over time? What about the gender gap in other countries? And from a customer perspective: How are movies directed by women perceived by the audience?
Data and methodology
To answer these questions I started my analysis with a data set that includes all movies listed on the IMDb website with at least 100 votes and published between 1906 and 2019. This results in a total of 81,273 movies. While IMDb lists the name of the director on the website, it does not mention the director’s gender. To determine the film director’s gender, I matched the first name of each film director to the name database of the Social Security Administration of the US government. This database includes all names given to babies born in the US between 1880 and 2019 and the corresponding gender of the babies. I then assigned genders to names based on the frequency of gender for each name, so for example if 100,000 female babies were given the name Julia and only 5 male babies were given the name Julia, I classified the name Julia as female. Of course, I manually checked the film directors with names that can be both male and female, such as Robin (Not everything can be automated with data analytics, unfortunately…). After data cleansing and name matching, the final data set includes 65,996 movies.
Is the gender gap narrowing over time?
The answer to this question is: yes, the gender gap is narrowing, but at a very slow pace. Between 1906 and 1993 the percentage of movies directed by women slightly fluctuated over the years but never reached 10%. Since 1994, the percentage of movies directed by women is over 10% but the milestone of 20% has yet to be reached. It took 88 years to reach the milestone of 10% and it is already taking 25 years to reach the next milestone of 20%.
What about the gender gap in other countries?
Hollywood is usually the main focus area for research about the movie industry. If we look at all movies produced since 2010, 42% of movies were fully or partially produced in the USA. Although the production country and film director’s nationality do not have to be the same, it is still interesting to analyze the share of female film directors by (production) country. The USA is definitely behind other countries in terms of female film directors; since 2010, 13% of active film directors are female, while the share of film directors in Finland is 43%. Other European countries are also doing a much better job compared to the USA; the share of female directors in Estonia is 35%, in Bosnia and Herzegovina it is 33%, in Luxembourg 29%, Norway 26%, and in Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands it is also slightly above 20%. However, the total number of film directors in these countries is of course significantly lower compared to the USA. Another large film industry is Bollywood, where 16% of directors are female compared to 13% in Hollywood.
How are movies directed by women perceived by the audience?
Many of us do not really care whether a movie is directed by a man or a woman, we just want to watch good movies and that is exactly why we should all care about female representation in the film industry. Data shows that both men and women give significantly higher ratings to movies directed by women.
IMDb ratings are used as a proxy for how movies are perceived by the audience. The histogram chart below shows that these ratings are normally distributed with skewness of -0.68 and kurtosis of 3.58.
The average IMDb rating for movies published between 1906 and 2019 is 6.26 for movies created by female film directors and 6.19 for male film directors. This rating difference of 0.06 is statistically significant at the 1% level and this difference increases in absolute numbers and in significance if we take subsets of the data and look at more recent decades only.
The higher ratings for movies directed by female film directors are not driven by female voters only, both male and female voters give higher ratings to movies directed by women.
If we look at genres of movies published since 2010, female film directors get higher ratings in the family, fantasy, and musical genres. While male film directors get significantly higher ratings in the history and mystery genres. Also, men appear to be better in romance (that’s quite a surprise). However, it must be noted that the comparison of genres can be tricky because women are underrepresented in many genres.
Film festivals have always been dominated by male film directors. At the Venice film festival, only four nominated movies between 2017 and 2019 were directed by women.
A spot in competition at the Venice Film Festival can launch careers and Oscar winners, but in recent years, films directed by women have been mostly excluded from vying for the coveted Golden Lion. Among the 62 films that competed between 2017 and 2019, only four were made by women.
Things have improved at the 77th edition of the Venice film festival that took place last week, where 44% of the films in competition are directed by women. According to the festival’s director Alberto Barbera, films this year were selected “exclusively on the basis of their quality and not as a result of gender protocols. If both the Venice film festival and IMDb ratings highlight the quality of films directed by women, it is time for Hollywood to start narrowing the gender gap at a much faster pace and across all movie genres.
Thanks for reading!
