Women’s Representation Behind The Scenes In Hollywood Has Barely Advanced In 26 Years.jpeg)
One calls LinkedIn a “pit of despair.” Another feels an overwhelming lack of purpose. Yet another groused about simply feeling stuck.
For myriad Hollywood executives who have lost their jobs over the past year, finding work has not been the only challenge they’ve had to overcome. It’s also the feeling of hopelessness that comes with being out of the game with little to no promise of ever returning.
“It’s almost a state of panic because this industry is so challenged,” lamented one out-of-work TV executive. “I was having these chest pains and for a second I thought, is this my heart? But ultimately, it was panic. I went to see my doctor who did a bunch of tests and everything is ultimately fine. But he asked, ‘Do you want to talk to somebody?’ And I was like, ‘Listen, I know what the issue is.’ I didn’t feel like I needed to go talk to a therapist. I know what the issue is and a therapist isn’t going to help me find a job.”
“The days are long,” adds a jobless woman with decades of experience in marketing. “I am bored. And it’s hard for me because all my friends work, even my friends who are not in the industry. Everybody works. I am kind of miserable.”
A highly experienced but unemployed suit, who like the other execs asked Deadline to not use his name for fear it would impact his job search, said the daily barrage of headlines about contraction in Hollywood don’t do his psyche any favors. With the state’s Employment Development Department reporting losses of more than 12,000 entertainment jobs from May 2023 to May 2024 — coupled with threats of even more layoffs at Warner Bros, Paramount and Disney — help-wanted signs are not exactly plastered all over the studios these days.
“I mean, look, you can only go through so many rounds of interviews where you are easily an exceptionally qualified person before you realize there are more people out there than positions,” the suit said. “Am I more hirable now as a mid-50s senior executive who hasn’t worked in two years than I was two years ago?”
“Eight Out Of 10 Clients Don’t Even Recognize They’re Grieving”
What he and the other out-of-work executives are experiencing are various levels of grief — a process that can be painful but should never be overlooked, advises career coach Laverne McKinnon.
“Grief is an experience that’s not specific to death,” says McKinnon, who specializes in working with members of the entertainment and tech industries. “Grief is the normal reaction to any type of loss, including loss of career, loss of industry. And I think many people don’t recognize how they are grieving. I’m going to say eight out of 10 clients don’t even recognize that they’re grieving because it’s not like someone died. And so they have a lot of shame around how they’re feeling and why they’re feeling so helpless, hopeless, and powerless. And it’s like, there’s a reason why this is part of the mourning process, because this thing that you love, this thing that you identified with, this thing that you are attached to, it no longer exists.”
“When one is not given permission to grieve or even acknowledge their grief, it leads to a loss of resiliency,” added McKinnon. “And whether someone chooses to try to return to the entertainment industry or pivot to a new career, resiliency is required for any type of job search as well as long-term career success and fulfillment. Take the opportunity to reground oneself in your values and in your purpose so that you can make a decision from a place of empowerment as opposed to helpless, hopelessness and powerlessness.”
“I think this past year has been one of the toughest,” said top Hollywood executive recruiter Jamie Waldron, Senior Partner, Global Head of Sports, Media + Entertainment, at Modern Executive Solutions. “It’s the toughest I’ve seen since probably around 2009 when it was really tough, too. I think it’s my biggest challenge as a recruiter to make sure that, to the boundaries that I can do it, people feel good and don’t have this ‘the world is ending and there’s no hope’ [feeling] because good people always get hired. A lot of times, candidates who become unemployed think either they’re never going to get another job or especially, if they’re later in their career, ‘Oh my God, this is it and this is the end.’ It’s getting them past that. It’s not a doom factor, it’s not a crisis, and it will get better.”
Just don’t ask how long the job search will take because coaches like McKinnon can’t say.
“No one has experienced the acute level of uncertainty that people are living with today. Our minds literally cannot tolerate not knowing,” says McKinnon. “So when clients ask me that question, all I can say is, ‘I don’t know. We don’t know.’ If anyone tells you an answer, it’s like they’re just pulling information out of their ass, which is why I always go back to values and life purpose, because there are choices to be made. You have to go inward, not outward, to make those decisions. The hope comes from using this pause as an opportunity to do that personal development work. Some people love it and embrace it, other people are really resistant because they’re like, ‘Just tell me what I need to do, even if I have to run back-to-back marathons.’ And I’m like, ‘No one can tell you that. This is an opportunity to use the pause to get really clear on what’s important to you.’ ”
That’s what happened to Karen Jones, a veteran PR executive who left HBO in 2022 after 23 years with the company. She took a year to decide what to do next.
“It was just a deep amount of reflection,” recalls Jones. “I didn’t take it lightly. I was in therapy. I was talking to my family, trusted advisors. I was talking to my financial manager. I mean, there were many different factors, both internal and external that went into it. But ultimately, I had always known that I wanted to do something else, that I wanted to have another chapter.”
She now works as a leadership and career coach and advises folks who are both employed and out of work in Hollywood.
“People sometimes will say ‘Gosh, you seem like you’ve just figured it all out and made this pivot,” Jones says. “I’ve tried to be very transparent about what the journey of the in-between feels like. It is messy. It is uncertain, and you can’t power your way through it. You have to give it some space to transition to something else, or even when you find a new opportunity to not still be carrying the baggage of whatever it was that you left behind.”
You have to give it some space in order to transition to something else, or even when you find a new opportunity to not still be carrying the baggage of whatever it was that you left behind.
KAREN JONES
Longtime producer Robert Morton, who is best known for running Late Night and The Late Show with David Letterman in the ’80s and 90s, still carried some of that baggage when he made a successful transition to real estate a decade ago. Although he quickly realized that his talents were transferrable — he still solves crises, and instead of looking at ratings each morning, he looks at what’s sold and what remains on the market — he admits his Hollywood ego used to get in the way.
“It was seeing my name as the first credit on a roll on every show that I did, to seeing my name on a real estate sign on Sundays, advertising an open house,” remembers Morton. “There was a bit of an ego thing there where I thought, ‘Oh f*ck. Everybody that I impressed in my old business, they’re seeing these signs in front of the Brentwood Country Mart. They’re seeing these signs in the Palisades.’ It’s where the concentration of all of the successes in the business lives. And there was a moment where the ego hurt.”
Then something changed. As he became more successful at selling, his former colleagues and friends were eager to learn his secret of living life outside of Hollywood.
“Every time I have an open house at a property, somebody comes by and says, ‘How did you do it? You’re so lucky. What do I have to do?’ And almost daily I get calls from peers in the entertainment business who say to me, ‘How do I do it? I want to get out.’ It’s like they’re in prison. I help them break out of the yard! I basically told him that you just got to be proud of whatever you do and don’t feel like you’re giving up something so precious and so wonderful.”
The advancement of women in behind-the-scenes roles in the film industry has been disappointingly slow over the past quarter-century, according to a new report.
The report, authored by Martha Lauzen, executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, is a compilation of annual analyses of the top 250 highest-grossing films from 1998 to 2023. Over the last 26 years, Lauzen has analyzed over 82,000 film credits to determine the proportion of women occupying key positions in the industry. The main takeaway from this report is that women’s progress behind the scenes has been staggeringly slow.
Women's advancement has lagged the most in film editing. The percentage of women working as editors on the top films saw a mere 1% increase, climbing from 20% in 1998 to 21% in 2023. “One percentage point in 26 years!” Lauzen lamented in an email.
Producers, cinematographers, and writers haven’t fared much better. The proportion of women working as producers increased by just 2%, from 24% in 1998 to 26% in 2023. Women cinematographers only gained three percentage points over the past 26 years, from (4% in 1998 to 7% in 2023). The percentage of female writers was also stagnant, moving from 13% in 1998 to only 17% in 2023.
These jobs remain male-dominated because most are unaware of the gender imbalance.
“When was the last time you read or saw a story about the underemployment of women working as editors or cinematographers?” Lauzen says. “While directors have understandably received a good deal of attention over the last two and a half decades, editors, cinematographers, and those working in other important roles have not.”
“We don't hear about the low numbers of women working as editors, cinematographers, and in other roles, so there's no pressure on the industry to change,” she adds.
The issue does not stem from a lack of female interest or talent. “This is not a pipeline issue. Women are well-represented in film schools. This is a hiring issue,” Lauzen says.
As Lauzen points out, there's been significant media focus on boosting the number of female directors. Despite these efforts, the number of female directors rose a mere 6% over the last quarter century. The blockbuster success of Barbie in 2023 sparked hopes that more stories would be told from a female perspective. Yet, some skeptics believe Barbie's impact may be limited.
“Ask around Hollywood and the consensus seems to be that Barbie is a singular success, a gargantuan feat helmed by particular talents, the writer-director Greta Gerwig and the star Margot Robbie. Translation: Don’t expect a lot of movies like that in theaters anytime soon,” summarizes a New York Times report.
Storytelling wields immense power, shaping and reinforcing our culture. Female directors and writers are crucial because they’re more likely to tell stories from a female perspective. Without their voices, these perspectives remain unheard. However, equally important is achieving gender balance in other behind-the-scenes roles. Editors and cinematographers play vital roles in bringing the director’s vision to life, and having gender balance in these positions also brings a female perspective to the final product.
This report reveals just how few women have been involved in these projects over the last 26 years. “The long-term trends in women’s employment are often lost in the year-to-year fluctuations that reveal increases of a couple of percentage points one year, only to be followed by decreases the next. The longer timeline highlighted in this report provides a sobering historical record of the unrelenting underemployment of women in the mainstream film industry,” she wrote in the report.