Despite some modest gains, Hollywood is still a boys club for directors, according to the latest report from USC Annenberg’s Inclusion Initiative published on Wednesday.
The report found that, out of the 112 directors who were behind the top 100 movies of 2024, 13.4% of them (15 people) were women. That represented a slight uptick from 2023, when 12.1% of the directors behind the top flicks were women.
If you were not tracking this yourself, female directors were behind movies like “The Substance” (Coralie Fargeat) and “Babygirl” (Halina Reijn) in 2024.
USC’s report — spearheaded by Inclusion Initiative founder Dr. Stacy L. Smith, an associate professor of communication and Dr. Katherine Pieper, the program’s director — also looked at how women and minorities have fared as directors going back to 2007.
If one wanted to be optimistic, the report showed that the slice of women behind the top movies represented a major jump from ’07, when only 2.7% of the top movies were directed by women; the industry hit a modern nadir in 2013-14, when only 1.9% of the top movies were directed by women.
Still, the report’s key takeaway was that “progress for women and people of color as directors has plateaued,” as 2024’s representation levels were similar to the year prior.
“The film industry has demonstrated that it can increase the percentage of women directors and hold that progress,” Dr. Smith said in a release accompanying the report.
“Yet, there is much more room to improve. Women directors are still significantly outnumbered and rarely get multiple opportunities behind the camera. Hollywood cannot be satisfied with the change that has occurred when there is still work to be done.”
In terms of minority directors, things have not improved too much, either, according to the report.
Last year, 24.1% of directors were from an “underrepresented racial/ethnic group,” according to the report — which again, was a small increase from the year prior, when 22.4% of directors were from a minority group.
The percentage of minority directors in 2024 was the second-highest ever recorded, topped only by the 28.6% of films in 2021 that were led by a director from an underrepresented group. The report did not define what groups are included in its underrepresented category, beyond saying they are not white.
“This point statistic is drastically below the percentage of underrepresented individuals in the U.S. population (41.6%),” the report said.
USC’s report did not specify if Jewish directors — or directors from any other religious background — were counted towards its white directors category or if they were included in the underrepresented racial/ethnic group category.
For reference, 75.3% of the U.S. population is white, according to the Census Bureau, and 2.4% of Americans are Jewish, per Pew Research Center.
Taking a macro look at the industry since 2007, the USC report noted there have been 98 individual women across the top 1,800 grossing films during that time. That includes Angelina Jolie, Sofia Coppola, and “Barbie” director Greta Gerwig.
“Not one company has hired at least 10 women of color to helm a popular movie across the last 18 years,” the report said. “Across the 18-year sample, Universal Pictures (7) and Walt Disney Studios (6) have hired the most women of color directors whereas Lionsgate (1) and STX Entertainment (0) have hired the least.”
Dr. Smith, in her comments accompanying the reports, said that “even with the progress made” since 2007, “there are too few opportunities and too few repeated chances for skilled, talented, and qualified directors” who are women and/or minorities.
“If we are to say that real change has occurred, we must see continued increases across the board on these metrics,” she added.