All research on gender bias in the film industry show male dominating the field. The Stockholm Feminist Film Festival works to counter that with an annual film festival featuring female directors. The festival also works to provide data and to study the gender bias. One such study directed the spotlight to the streaming giant Netflix showing a vast gender gap of 96% among the directors on Netflix in Sweden.
According to The Local, the Stockholm Feminist Film Festival strives to improve gender equality in the film industry and under the its banners an evaluation of the gender equality levels of films and TV shows hosted on the Swedish version of Netflix was carried out. “It found that 96% of all films released on Netflix Sweden in 2016 had a male director.” the report said.
The 2017 edition of Stockholm Feminist Film Festival will be launched on 2 March. The program is available on the festivals website and tickets are available at Tickster.
The report goes on to inform that “the film festival also researched the gender balance among scriptwriters, producers and leading characters of films hosted on the platform. It found that 87% of the scriptwriters, 74% of the producers and 78% of the lead characters were men.”
“Netflix is the world’s biggest platform for films and TV shows. That the offering is so enormously unbalanced is a serious thing. If Netflix wants to contribute to gender equality, it’s high time they take in films by women,” Stockholm Feminist Film Festival head Stephanie Thögersen said in a statement.
All research made on the subject of gender bias in the film industry show similar results. According to an article in The Conversation research data from Australia shows that in general, “films with male producers, on average, have creative teams that are 70% male. Similarly, the average creative team for a film with female producers is 60% male. No matter the gender of the producer, key creative roles for men predominate”.
The Directors UK released news about a study into Gender Inequality Amongst Directors within the UK Film Industry, by Stephen Follows. It studied 2,591 UK films released over a ten-year period (2005-2014) and found that just 13.6% of working film directors in the last decade were women.
Finally according to the Guardian, Hollywood could be sued for discrimination against female directors, stating that the “Equal Employment Opportunity Commission report concludes that US film industry is guilty of discrimination against female directors, and plans to take action against studios”