Gender Diversity and Women Involvement in Filming and Advertising
After moving to London, I realised that we have a great merit in the advertising and filming industry in Turkey — gender diversity on sets. I hadn’t realised how lucky we were when I was there as it was natural for us to have a gender diverse crew. In a regular Turkish set, at least 40% of the crew is female, and if we mention about heads of departments this involvement reaches 50%.
When we started working on international projects, we were surprised to see the foreign agencies and clients getting very impressed with our gender diverse crews. I reckon this wasn’t expected from the Turkey image they had in mind before arriving. Indeed, Turkish women are open-minded, hardworking and powerful figures both in the work environment and within Turkish families.
Gender balance, along with all other aspects of diversity is very important to escape biased echo chambers. Amazing things happen when we open our minds to a broad range of views. Hearing from people unlike ourselves opens our minds, enriches and balances ourselves and allows broader thinking, resulting in great outcomes for any project we work on. That is why we are very lucky filmmakers in Turkey.
I’d like to share a photo from one of our sets below, which we worked with Flare BBDO, filming for Hewlett Packard in Turkey. As a big supporter of the #FreeTheBid and #SeeHer campaigns, HP and BBDO were glad to see the strong presence of women in the crew.
In Turkey, most of our first Assistant Directors are women. We have female focus pullers, art directors, costume designers, production managers, runners, and many more. I’ll introduce them personally in my upcoming blog posts.
Emre Ozgur
+44 7899 288880
