Gender equality in TV

OUR 2018 REPORT

In 2014, we issued our first ever report on female directorial representation in UK television production. Women Directors – Who’s Calling the Shots? highlighted the chronic lack of women directing UK programming and the narrow range of subgenres they were getting the opportunity to direct.

Keen to see if broadcasters had made headway in addressing this inequality, we followed that up with an updated 2018 report – Who’s Calling the Shots? A Report on Gender Inequality Among Screen Directors Working in UK Television – which analyses the gender of working directors by broadcaster (BBC, ITV, Channel 4, 5) and genre.

The updated findings revealed that the percentage of programmes directed by women between 2013 and 2016 had decreased by 2.98%. So, despite broadcasters’ apparent commitment to increasing gender equality in the aftermath of our 2014 report, the gender gap within our profession remained at unacceptable levels.

EVIDENCE

Our report analysed 47,444 episodes broadcast between 1 January 2013 and 31 December 2016 on the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and 5. This encompassed the work of 4,388 individual directors.

We found that:

• Each broadcaster showed a decline in the percentage of episodes directed by women between 2013 and 2016.
• Only 25% of episodes broadcast across the four television channels in that period were directed by women.
• Factual programming showed the most significant decrease, by 9.8 percentage points.
• Children’s programming saw a 4.5 percentage point decline.
• Other genres saw a small improvement (but still had an overall lower percentage of women directors): multi-camera and entertainment increased by 2.8 percentage points, while drama and comedy rose by 4.4 percentage points.

The full report also reviewed specific broadcaster performance within each genre over this same period.

INTERVENTIONS

In the aftermath of our 2014 report, we worked in partnership with broadcasters to place women directors into on-set career development initiatives. Our 2018 figures appeared to indicate that this type of direct intervention had a positive effect, with continuing drama showing an increase of 7.3 percentage points from 2013 to 2016.

Casualty, Holby City and Doctors all developed partnership initiatives with Directors UK and Creative Skillset in the form of the BBC Continuing Drama Directors’ Scheme, and the results were clear to see – with jumps of 14.8%, 14.4% and 16.2% respectively over the time period.

Similarly, in 2015, ITV Studios ran a two-week multi-camera training programme on Coronation Street and Emmerdale, which was open to women and BAME directors. Both programmes saw a spike that year, with women directing 29.5% of Coronation Street episodes (an increase of 6.8 percentage points over the previous year) and 19% of Emmerdale episodes (a 6.5% increase).

REPORT RECOMMENDATIONS

Within the report, we made a series of recommendations to be undertaken by UK broadcasters and Ofcom to help improve equality, transparency and accountability:

• We called for Ofcom to make it a mandatory annual requirement for all UK broadcasters to monitor and publicly report on the diversity characteristics of all those making programmes for them. This reporting must include both permanent staff and freelancers. In particular, we wanted to see broadcasters monitor and publish the equality data of senior production roles such as producers, writers and directors, as well as the heads of departments. This transparency makes broadcasters accountable for the effectiveness of their equality, diversity and inclusion actions and commissioning goals and identify areas of concern that can be positively addressed.
• We called for Ofcom to set broadcasters targets to use production crews whose gender, ethnic and disability makeup mirrors that of the UK population, both in front of and behind the camera, by 2020.
• We called on broadcasters to take practical measures to improve the diversity of their programme makers and to build the following provisions into their commissioning contracts:
  • Unconscious bias training for everyone in hiring or hiring approval positions in broadcasters and production companies.
  • A commitment to regularly bring commissioners, production companies and freelancers together to network to improve job mobility within the industry.
  • A commitment to fairer recruitment practices in line with other industries to improve equal access to opportunities for all; in particular, externally advertising roles and the introduction of written references for freelance production staff. Hirers should also commit to women making up 50% of those being interviewed for senior production roles.
• We called on all broadcasters to commit 0.25% of their commissioning spend across all programme making as a levy to fund industry access and career development schemes for under-represented groups.

OUR 2014 REPORT

In our first TV gender report Who’s Calling the Shots? (2014), we looked at how attitudes within the media industry were preventing women from reaching their full potential. We found that despite women representing almost 30% of the directing workforce they were grossly underrepresented in directorship roles compared to their male counterparts.

• Only 8% of entertainment and comedy had been directed by women.
• Only 13% of drama had been directed by women.
• Factual programming was at that point the best performing genre; 50% of episodes were directed by women, but much of this was work about, food, body issues, lifestyle and home.

As a result, we made a number of recommendations for change, including calling for a consistent monitoring of freelancers and asking that the standards of fair selection applied to permanent staff be extended to the hiring of freelancers.

Our work produced a number of positive outcomes:

• Discussions with Channel 4 led to the development of a mentoring scheme to open up more directing opportunities for women.
• We worked with Creative Skillset to develop work placements for women directors on a number of continuing drama programmes, including Hollyoaks (Channel 4), Holby City and Casualty (BBC).
• Working with broadcasters to run the high-end drama scheme which created work placements on premium TV drama series for women directors. Shows in the scheme include Mr Selfridge, The Tunnel, Humans, Dickensian, Jamestown, Bodyguard, Silent Witness and Call the Midwife.

In response to the industry calls to monitor freelancers from several organisations, the broadcasters joined forces with the Creative Diversity Network in 2016 to start collecting equality, diversity and inclusion data under the Project Diamond scheme.

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