Beneath the Layers of Ink and Paint
Uncovering Gender Pay Bias in Animation
I’m often asked the question: why aren’t more women working in animation? For the last decade, I have worked in this industry during which time I became a wife and then mother; I have observed first-hand the realities women face in this male-dominated industry. My own research has led me to conclude that a more appropriate question people might ask is, where did all the women who once worked in animation go? And, where can women be found today?
Throughout the analog days of animation, up until 1989, the Ink and Paint department was by far the largest part of the industry’s workforce, at one point encompassing over half of The Animation Guild’s voting membership.¹ Divisions originally found within the Ink and Paint department included Animation Checking, Color Modeling (now known as Color Design), Inking and Painting. Collectively, their primary responsibility dealt with the tail-end of the animation pipeline and involved producing hundreds of thousands of individual hand-inked cels that were required to make the still images of an animated feature appear to move on screen. Such a heavy workload naturally mandated a large workforce. Considering the massive size of this one department, it behooved animation studios to pay individuals less for these types of jobs, and promote the ideology that this work was less prestigious. Their solution? Hire women.
Walt Disney Studios dedicated an entire building to their Ink and Paint department, which proved useful in physically segregating their female workforce. Not only were these women discouraged from entering into other buildings where men worked, but they were subsequently denied the opportunity to work in any other animation jobs.² This was spelt out in a rejection note from 1938 sent by Walt Disney Productions to a female applicant, confirming the fact that “the only work open to women” dealt with inking and painting images on cel sheets. It was only during World War II, when men were drafted away from their jobs that women, in small numbers, received the chance to enter into other lines of animation work. Even after the war, women’s workplace mobility was heavily restricted for the company’s benefit in order to keep their source of low-priced labor where they were needed most — in their largest department.³
Over time, animation studios explored cost-saving solutions that would impact women in the industry disproportionately. Starting in the late ’50s, Disney Studios developed a system of cel Xeroxing which eventually led to the elimination of most Ink work in the industry. Then by the late 70’s, several animation studios were actively attempting to reduce their bottom line further by outsourcing a majority of their Ink and Paint work abroad. These developments, combined with the advent of computers and then 3D CGI technology the following decade, caused the industry to transform completely. This change resulted in the largest staffed department in animation, primarily made up of women, to plummet in size as the industry shifted its local manpower towards CGI work by the mid-’90s. Given the more technical nature of this new work, there was (and still is) an ingrained societal bias against women taking these jobs. All these factors led to the ratio of women working in animation to diminish considerably by the end of the 20th century. Which brings us to where we are today:
Today, women make up less than one-third of studio employees working under union animation employers. These numbers are actually an improvement from 13 years ago: In 2006, only 16 percent of women made up animation’s creative workforce. It appears that women are slowly being welcomed back into the industry, but what type of work are they getting, how well are they being paid, and what opportunities exist for promotion? As it turns out, not every job that originated within the Ink and Paint Department disappeared from Hollywood entirely. Animation Checking and Color Design have managed to persist here to this day, primarily as a part of 2D animated productions. These two crafts remain female dominated, despite inhabiting a now male dominated industry.
One other current day, female dominated craft is Storyboard Revisionist, which was added to The Animation Guild’s contract (the agreement that Union employers abide by) as recently as 2012. Like Ink and Paint, Revisionists come at the tail-end of the storyboarding process. Revisionist work has in theory been considered an entryway into higher paying work as a storyboard or production board artist, then onward as a director. In reality, seasoned and experienced individuals will sometimes choose to do revisionist work because they recognize in practice what an essential role this position plays. Considering that less women are working in higher classified storyboard roles, one starts to wonder if more women are working as revisionists because they are being denied promotions, or because studios are simply more comfortable placing them in lower paying jobs, as they have done historically.
The storyboard department is not the only place where this hiring trend can be seen. At several studios, the job CGI Animator/Modeler is tiered under the union contract into different categories of pay, with tier 5 offering the lowest journey minimum rate, and tier 1 the highest. The studio reserves the right to move individuals up a tier, as stated in the contract, by “function and skill set,” rather than by time and experience. This means that it’s up to the employer’s discretion to offer individuals raises and promotions when they see fit. Based on employment data from November 2018 provided by the Animation Guild, it appears that under this tiered system, women are less likely to be categorized as a higher-tier employee than men.
Looking back at the current day female dominated crafts of the Animation Guild union contract — Animation Checking, Color Design and Storyboard Revision — is it possible that these roles could have anything else in common other than primarily employing women? It turns out, they do. Their current union journey minimums are all exactly the same.
Further research, ideally in the form of a Pay Equity Study, is needed to fully understand whether people working in these specific classifications are adequately being compensated for their work. Although as someone who sits in design departments alongside color designers as a background artist, I can personally vouch for the nature of their work and say that it requires just as much skill and provides just as much value as my own (more male dominated) job does, yet their union journey minimum equals only 85.6 percent of that of any other design classification. The only logical reason for this pay discrepancy is owed to the historical precedent set by the feminization of work from the Ink and Paint days of animation. And this pay ratio — 85.6 percent — happens to align closely with women’s earnings as a percentage of men’s in California, last evaluated in 2017 to be 83.4 percent. It appears that this is the average percentage by which our section of the world still devalues women’s work.
The perception that there needs to be more women working in animation may not necessarily be the only answer to the problem when viewed with a historical lens. After all, we’ve always been here. In fact, at one point, we comprised a majority of the workforce. It’s the value in our work that has been systematically withheld from us. The inherent value of our work is equal to that of our male counterparts, yet the pay often is not. Without the present day contributions of these essential craftswomen, no matter where they may fall in the pipeline, animated productions would inevitably suffer in quality and balloon in retake costs.
Studios should additionally be less reticent in promoting women, and explore ways in which they can facilitate retaining their talents. This can include exploring more flexible work options for mothers, who often have to work their way back to the top after taking maternity leave and are consequently left in a cycle of perpetually feeling undervalued and underpaid.
It’s nearly been a century since the inception of Hollywood’s Animation Industry.⁴ How much longer will we go until gender pay equity is genuinely addressed here? Let’s start today, on Equal Pay Day.
Join the Conversation on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram: @AnimationEquity
[1] Sito, Tom. Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson.
[2] Johnson, Mindy. Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation.
[3] Hill, Erin. Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production.
[4] Walt and Roy Disney opened their Los Angeles based Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in 1923.
