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Los Angeles – The Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW) has released the Executive Summary of the 2011 Hollywood Writers Report: Recession and Regression. The study examines writers’ employment and earnings by ethnicity, gender, and age from 2008 through 2009 in the motion picture and television industry. As in previous years, diverse writers face significant obstacles to employment in Hollywood.
According to the report’s author Darnell Hunt, Ph.D., director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies and professor of sociology at UCLA, “From the initial project pitch to project completion, each phase of the production pipeline has the potential to serve as a barrier to or facilitator of increased diversity among industry writers. The WGAW is committed to working with the rest of the industry to ensure that the production pipeline is shaped less by the former and more by the latter. Diversity is not a luxury, not even in tough times. The Hollywood industry, in the final analysis, depends on increasingly diverse audiences and on the stories to which they can relate.”
The full report will be available in late summer. Some of the key findings in the summary include:
· Women writers’ overall employment share declined, driven by a one-point loss in the film sector, where women writers’ share dipped from 18% in 2007 to 17% in 2009.
· Although the employment share for women television writers remained stable (still a very low 28%), the earnings gap in television between male and female writers widened again – an 84% increase from the previous report, issued in 2009.
· While the minority share of television employment rebounded to 2005 levels (still a very low 10% up from 9%), the minority share of film employment declined to the lowest level in a decade (down from 6% to 5%).
· Despite the gain in television employment, the television earnings gap for minorities widened to the largest level in a decade. The television earnings gap for minorities more than doubled since the 2009 report.
· The employment rate remained flat for the largest group of older writers (age 41-50) at 61%; however the employment group for the youngest group of writers (under age 31), declined by four percentage points. TV writers age 51-60 had a decline of 1%, whereas writers age 61-70 actually had an increase of 1%.
To view the 2011 Hollywood Writers Report’s Executive Summary, click here.
As part of its continuing proactive efforts to enhance employment opportunities and open doors for diverse writers, the WGAW recently announced more than a dozen 2011 Writer Access Project honorees in drama and comedy TV categories. Now in its third year, the Guild’s innovative program, coordinated by the WGAW’s Diversity Department, identifies writers with television staffing experience and makes samples of their work available to entertainment industry decision makers, including showrunners, producers, network and studio executives, agents and managers. More info on the Guild’s WAP program and this year’s honorees can be found at: http://www.wga.org/wap.
Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
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This report vis a vis women is enraging. When is a class action suit going to be filed against the networks for their glaringly misogynistic hiring practices? It will be interesting to see the hiring statistics for this season, with its new female-skewing shows. My bet is it won’t be much better.
Why do you assume that women are being turned away from these writing jobs? Did it ever occur to you that less women grow up wishing they were TV writers than men? I have worked on several shows where there was a mandate from the networks to get more female writers. AND the network was willing to help pay for any minority writers. And if you look at this year’s pilots there was a huge jump in the number from females and female/male teams. Statistics can be very misleading.
Why on earth would you think that women wouldn’t want to be TV writers as much as men do? Are we not supposed to like being creative? Are we not supposed to like making money? Are we not supposed to like working with other talented people? Are we supposed to only want to sit alone writing romance novels? I’m sorry, but your premise is absurd!!
As for networks mandating the hiring of women writers, could you give me directions to *that* planet?
They do mandate hiring women writers — the execs demand that an 8-writer staff can no longer be the solid wall of white men it once was.
In my experience, this means two women per show. And one of those two women will most likely be the lone diversity hire, so the production gets a credit (because women do not count as “diverse” on their own, despite the horrible statistics you see above). There may or may not be a male person of color on the staff as well. So that’s three non-white-guys; four if you can’t find a woman to do double duty.
And when you ask to meet on many a show, your agent will tell you, point-blank, that they can’t submit you, because that show has “already hired their woman,” or “already made their diversity hire.”
So, yeah, statistics can be misleading. If you’re a white dude.
Bullshit. Go to any creative writing program in America. It’s 70 percent women. Women WANT the jobs. But lots are turned away by the conventional wisdom that no one will ever, ever hire them.
The plight of minorities seems worse, as it always has been.
The numbers for women are even worse in the DGA. Last numbers I have seen said women held only 8% of all writing/production/post jobs in television and features (and even theatre). This is despite the fact that the college training programs host an even 50/50 of female and male students.
So women writers and young writers are both down. I’d hate to be a young woman writer searching for a gig right now…
Is this wage increase for male writers do to them being more productive, profitable, and getting more viewer ratings or is it do to their sex? What im asking is do the the increases and declines in salaries happen because of their scripts results or their sex? Can that even be studied? is their more of a market for male audience shows or female audience driven shows? Which are more profitable, merchandisable, and last longer on air? There is a lot I’d like to know that is not given in this article but may be very relevant to it.
I’m guessing it’s because men have such impeccable grammar.
@Michael:
You mean “DUE to them being…” and
Many 2011 network and studio pilot scripts I read were rife with typos like this. Nobody in the long line of people who wrote, read, gave notes, and proofed them seems to care. It’s depressing.
What’s the % of these classes of writers LOOKING for work? That would be a useful study unlike this. Is it that surprising that men from 41-50 are the most employed because there is probably more of them. But of course that doesn’t matter, it should be 100% black, female and handicapped people writing.
The methodology here is flawed — and it’s worse than it looks.
Similarly to the way our national unemployment statistics drop the people who are no longer looking for work (where we hear that the actual unemployment number is close to 16%, not 9%), this study doesn’t count people who have dropped out of the Guild, or who haven’t worked in the previous 12 months. To pick one example, when they say that the employment remained flat for older writers (61% working)it only reflects 61% of those who reported income in the previous year.
So what this doesn’t reflect is all the women, older writers, and minority writers who aren’t employed at all anymore, and have dropped off the radar.
As someone who works in the writing trade and as a viewer of film and TV who has been watching less and less – writers are not male and female, black and white, urban or rural, young or old – they are only good or bad. The only writing that is relevant is engaging, well-crafted writing with true-to-life characters that viewers care about. All the rest – meaningless statistics.
I wish I never read this article. Now, I’m pissed off!!!
It would be interesting to see a breakdown not just by age, but by number of years in the industry, to see if experience by itself does or does not correlate with age discrimination.
For example, would a 41-year-old with 15 years of credits encounter more age-related prejudice than a 41-year-old with 10 years? Even though they’re both the same age, could the more experienced writer run up against reactions from twenty-something execs and producers along the lines of: “Shit, this guy’s been around forever. I watched that show when I was in seventh grade.”
In these days when anybody can Google for credits, it might be a question worth exploring.
Good point. I’m in my late 40s but people often assume (because of my credits) that I’m in my late 30s because I worked in journalism first.
Well they keep telling me I need to know ( or is it blow)
someone.
They keep telling me I have to be related to someone ( part dont’ count).
They keep telling me I’m wasting my time.
So when I go indie and sale out it will be .1 percent more to the pile of writers, directors, producers. umh.
Having just had a meeting at my agency, they were proud about a series they packaged getting picked up. I mentioned being a staff writer and my agent said that would be difficult… Because I’m white. Bummer. So many “diversity” complaints, networks feel obligated to hire talentless writers based on ethnicity to fill a quota. They get paid for doing nothing on a series. Sounds like welfare & pity has crashed the industry. Miss the old days of simply talent.
Oh, boo hoo. You only have 90 percent of the jobs to choose from. That 10 percent minority representation is so unfair. And the 17 percent women — what a travesty, since everyone knows that women are less than 17 percent of the population. You really have it tough, buddy.
Or it could be your agent’s just feeding you a line of crap to keep you from blaming him/her if you don’t land a job. You think they weren’t dishing up excuses in the “old days”?
“Miss the old days of simply talent.”
That is the whitest, straightest, malest sentence I think I have ever read.
It was better when everyone knew their place, Sweetie, wasn’t it?
You mean the old days of simply white. Go watch “Mad Men” and dream.
Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. The staff writers they hire from minority programs don’t cost ANYTHING to a show, they are funded off the budget. But what that does in the long run is trap many of those writers in being asked to spend several years as staff writers, because as soon as they get promoted, their salaries are then real.
Since the writers’ strike, the job shortage has frozen people in positions like writers’ assistant and script coordinator that used to be stepping stone jobs; they get all the freelance gigs required by the WGA (or a show just eats the penalty fee rather than go through the headache of dealing with outside writers.)
As a consequence there has been a steadily widening gap between the top level writers who now crowd all the staffs and the “baby writers” who often get left out of staffs altogether. The showrunner training program is a nice thing, but it ignores the ongoing disintegration of the ladder to experience.
Yes and no. The assistant path to becoming a TV writer isn’t what it once was, largely because most of the studios and/or networks have some sort of talent program in place that offers shows a financial incentive for hiring from the home team. Most — but not all — of the programs are diversity-based.
But those staff writers who come up through those programs are only “free” for the first 14 weeks or so of their employment, at which point they can be cut loose — not a whole season, and certainly not the season after that. What’s more, they’ve at least risen to the top of a pool of talent to get into the programs in the first place, which is more than I can say for many assistants and script coordinators, who are often tossed scripts after years of work (which then have to be heavily rewritten) out of obligation and/or guilt.
I agree that top-heavy staffs which eat up a show’s budget do no favors and squeeze out the mid-level writer (and I am a mid-level writer myself, so I know whereof I speak) but the problem isn’t the diversity programs — as in most things, the cream will rise, regardless of how a person gets their break. One path has gotten a little harder, is all, while another path has opened up.
Why do you assume the writers they hire based on ethnicity are any less talented than you, quotas or not? That’s a lot of nerve. I’ve have worked in both television and advertising for more than 25 years, and I have seen plenty of talentless, less experienced or even inexperienced people get jobs and promotions over people of color simply because they were white, and usually male. Don’t assume that ethnic people are talentless because you’re bitter. I’m guessing in “the old days,” you were the one that got the jobs while people like me were given the excuses, the brush-off, the “think about doing something else with your life” instead of getting a chance to do what we loved. Geez, do I get to be bitter, too?
Um, are you not able to understand math? White men are about 40 percent of the population and have 80 percent of the jobs. Do you really need better than two-to-one odds to get a job?
I’m sorry, Written By, but your agent isn’t being honest with you. Did your agency get you other staffing meetings this season? Because it sounds like they’re making poor excuses for your lack of employment.
I was a diversity Staff Writer on 2 shows before I moved up on my next job. Both shows ALSO hired white first-time Staff Writers. That was in addition to the white upper-level writers. Many of my “non-diverse” friends have been hired as Staff Writers. Their agents are not telling THEM that they can’t get staffed because they’re white.
Diversity slots are IN ADDITION TO the regular writing staff budget (and they’re not even available at every studio). Some shows opt to only hire upper level writers with their budget, and then add a diversity Staff Writer, but then that diversity writer IS NOT TAKING YOUR SLOT — it wasn’t going to be there to begin with.
The “talentless” diversity writer taking the “deserving” white writer’s place is a myth largely perpetuated by reps who don’t have the balls to tell their clients that they can’t get them a job because either (a) they’re a shitty rep, or (b) the writing isn’t quite good enough. The majority of diversity hires I know have Screenwriting MFAs from top film schools, have worked the assistant route just like their “non-diverse” counterparts, and typically have a track record of writing awards, or produced short films, or plays, or published fiction…and/or they have some valuable work expertise (such as in the legal, medical or law enforcement professions). Strip my name off my scripts and resume and just try to pick me out of a pool of male/female/any color writers.
There’s so much race and sex-baiting and bitterness on these boards coming from people who clearly have no idea how the television industry actually works. The majority of TV “writing” consists of pitching storylines and talking through character arcs, etc, as a group. It’s valuable to have insight from people from different genders, races, social classes, prior work backgrounds, because there are a variety of characters on screen. I believe good writers can write for any type of character, but that’s complicated by the break-neck pace of TV production. Instead of trying to research or fabricate something you know nothing about, it’s easiest to turn to the writer next to you and get their perspective. This is why diversity (in the broadest sense) on TV staffs is important. It’s really not just some hippy-dippy equality thing. We operate in a global economy, TV is a global product, and just like other global Fortune 500 corporations, the media companies have a huge financial incentive to show that they are at least somewhat sensitive to the demographic realities of their client base (i.e. the viewing audience). The diversity initiatives are imperfect, but at least it’s a good-faith attempt to mitigate a long-standing and clearly documented problem in TV hiring practices.
By the way, there is a wide-spread assumption amongst upper-level writers that ALL Staff Writers are going to suck. There’s a lot of benign nepotism hiring at that level. Every Staff Writer, diversity hire or not, has a 20 week trial option period, and then they can be dropped from their contract. A lot of Staff Writers, regardless of color, wash-out after their first job. There’s an endless supply of new writers to take their place in the system. And there are no “diversity slots” after that first level. So maybe every diversity hire is “talentless”…but then ask yourself why so many of us manage to rise up through the system after that first job. It’s not because there aren’t any white writers to compete against. This is a BUSINESS. Nobody’s paying anyone a six-figure salary out of pity. It’s a FANTASY, guys. Occam’s Razor: Is it more likely that there’s a vast Hollywood conspiracy to pay a bunch of minorities who can’t write a lot of money to sit around and twiddle their thumbs while legions of brilliant white writers can’t get work (which goes against the findings of every report out there)…or is it more likely that your agent is making excuses for not doing his/her job? I have great reps, but I’m well-aware that they feed me a steady diet of spin. It’s what they do for a living. Just chew on that awhile…
Film production overall was down 25%. And overall employment was down 6%. BUT MINORITIES LOST ONE WHOLE PERCENT?!?!? AND SO DID WOMEN?!?! HOLY SHIT THE STRAIGHTWHITEMAN APOCALYPSE IS COMING
But wait… if the film industry went down 6% but minorities and women only went down 1%… that means white men are losing most of the jobs. Ah, who cares, they had the “privilege” to begin with.
Remember — the wage gap increased! From $5000 to $9000 or so – which is pretty minimal when it comes to TV contracts. $98,000 vs. $108,000 – boy, my heart really weeps for those poor female writers, most of whom have much less experience on the whole than their male counterparts. If a larger percentage of female writers are under forty and a larger number of male writers are over forty, which gender on average has a higher quote? I’ll wait for you to use your phone calculator.
So women’s share of employment has flatlined at 28% over the past four years. Four years when women have risen up the ranks at studios, networks and as writers. Yet the percentage is flat. Same with minorities – flat at 10%. Is it the fault of the amorphous system on the whole, or perhaps has the number of experienced, talented women and minorities may have reached some kind of talent pool limit? Like, maybe only a certain percentage of the population on the whole has the ability to become a professional writer, and more white men than women or minorities pursue it, resulting in overall a larger population of potential professional writers.
Or maybe there’s a mass white male conspiracy across the dozens of competing entertainment companies, many of whom focus on entertaining women. Yep, that’s it.
Here’s my question — were the 00′s better than the 90′s? Unequivocally, yes.
Will the next ten years be better (or worse, if you’re a SWM)? Of course! Who can seriously say no?
Bottom line, corporations aren’t going to risk millions on less qualified writers simply because they’re not straight and white and male. So more minorities and women need to become qualified. It’s been working for straight white men for decades.
But here’s another question — who wants to read a straight white male baby writer?
No one.
Oh, and I love the way you equate being white and male with having “talent.” Yeah, in the good old day, everyone knew that only white men had it — that’s why they didn’t bother with these silly quotas.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe you couldn’t get a gig on the show because it was ALREADY stuffed full of white men?
Most high achievers in most fields are male. A big part of this is due to the fact that men, much more than women, are valued by society in proportion to their productivity.
Another part is the notorious bell curve. There tends to be much wider variation in mental ability among men than women. Men are more likely to be found at the highest and lowest extremes; women tend to be found in the middle. Oddly, no one ever complains that remedial courses in schools tend to be dominated by boys, or wonders if it all has to do with gender bias.
According to the official chess rankings (fide.com), 99 of the top 100 players in the world are men. This despite the fact that chess does not depend on physical strength, and that there are enough serious women players around to justify the existence of a separate women’s championship.
So where is the evidence that there is some kind of conspiracy to keep out women writers? People who make charges like this should be required to present proof other than the fact that they don’t like how the statistics fall.
I will say, however, that it is absolutely inexplicable why “minority” writers are in the minority in Hollywood. I just can’t seem to figure that one out.
And this is the reason movies and TV sucks.