Women Creatives Thought Hollywood Could Change. Were They Wrong?
From left: Gina Prince-Bythewood, Emma Seligman, Liz Tigelaar, Nikyatu Jusu, Stephanie Savage, Katori Hall, and Gloria Calderón Kellett.
Barbie made progress look so painless. In Greta Gerwig’s $1.4 billion-dollar-grossing worldwide blockbuster, the Barbies of Barbie Land operated under the blissful belief that sexism didn’t exist. The presidency, the Supreme Court, Nobel Prize winners, construction workers, doctors—all female. This was a fantasy sold by a toy company, of course, but an eerily convincing one. And its magic seemed to translate directly to our world when, in July 2023, Gerwig celebrated the biggest debut in box office history for a female-directed film, after years of well-publicized industry initiatives on behalf of the post–#MeToo, post–Time’s Up, post–#OscarsSoMale era. Gerwig’s extraordinary success seemed the sort of bellwether women behind the camera in Hollywood had long awaited.
“I cried, because I feel like a new precedent has been set,” says director, writer, and producer Emma Seligman (Bottoms; Shiva Baby). “Even if I know there’s so much conversation around what that means.”
“What that means” remains the sticking point. Barbie’s utopia provided an uncanny blueprint for the state of Hollywood today, wherein rose-colored lenses obscure a harsher truth. “Just a few high-profile cases can skew our perceptions of reality,” says Martha M. Lauzen, PhD, a professor at San Diego State University and founder and executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. And the reality is indeed darker than Barbie’s success might suggest. “We don’t want to think that we have seen such minimal progress in a quarter of a century,” Lauzen adds. “But the numbers tell the story. The numbers don’t lie.”
Every year, USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, a think tank led by researcher Stacy L. Smith, PhD, analyzes the 100 highest-earning fictional films. In 2022, 9 percent of the top films were directed by women, an increase of exactly 1 percent from the number of female directors in 2008—14 years earlier. In 2019, the advocacy group WIF estimated that even if the number of female directors increased by 25 percent every five years (and to be clear, that’s unlikely to happen), we’d have to wait until 2072 to reach parity.
Even in the wider world of television, women’s employment behind the scenes is far from representative. According to Lauzen’s research, in the 2021–22 broadcast and streaming season, 92 percent of the TV programs sampled featured zero female directors of photography; 79 percent had no female directors; 71 percent had no female creators; and 65 percent had no female writers. “Given the countless industry panels gender parity has received one would expect greater movement,” Lauzen says. “One of the things that has been so remarkable is the relative stability of most of the numbers.” Those numbers have held firm even as entertainment execs, advocacy associations, and awards shows have basked in the good press garnered by films like Patty Jenkins’s 2017 Wonder Woman or the Oscar wins of Kathryn Bigelow, Chloé Zhao, and Jane Campion. As Smith puts it, “This is why, unless you rely on the data, it’s just a lot of talk, talk, talk.”
Over the past six years, Hollywood’s publicity machine has made the case for cautious optimism. The #MeToo movement, first popularized in 2017, rooted out bad men in power, and the hope was that women would rise to replace them. And per Lauzen’s research, the number of women employed in behind-the-scenes roles on top-grossing films did increase by 6 percent between 2017 and 2022. The same metric jumped 10 percent across streaming TV programs and 4 percent across broadcast.
“It happens every 10 or 12 years: Some very ‘female’ movie has this giant moment,” says writer, executive producer, and showrunner Rachel Shukert (The Baby-Sitters Club; GLOW), citing the commotion following both Barbie and 2011’s Bridesmaids—ironically, a film directed by a man. “It’s like a swinging door—someone pushes it wide open, and it starts to close. It’s like, ‘Can you run through before it closes?’”
Bisha K. Ali considers herself one of the lucky few to have sprinted through such an opening. The British-Pakistani writer and showrunner left her career in UK television behind for L.A. in 2018. Within a year, she’d clinched the head writer role on the Disney+ series Ms. Marvel. Looking back, she’s convinced she might never have won such an opportunity had she not entered Hollywood during a “golden, shiny time where there was so much money, so many shows…and there [were] risks being taken,” making “allowance for people like me.”
This “golden, shiny time” would become known as “Peak TV,” a term FX Networks CEO John Landgraf coined in 2015. Netflix launched its first video-on-demand streaming service in 2007, and as the platform caught on, television exploded: The 210 scripted English-language programs available to American audiences 14 years ago, in 2009, ballooned to 599 series by 2022, according to FX’s annual industry tally. That growth ignited opportunities for new talent, many of them women. Streaming “opened doors for a lot of people who weren’t normally welcome in the tent,” says author, screenwriter, and showrunner Jenny Han (To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before; The Summer I Turned Pretty). With the cash flowing, buyers snapped up “new stories to tell…looking at books and plays and people they might not have looked at before.” By the 2021–22 TV season, women comprised 37 percent of creators, directors, writers, producers, editors, and directors of photography on streaming programs.
Jenny Han on the set of The Summer I Turned Pretty.
Gina Prince-Bythewood (right) talking to actress Viola Davis on the set of The Woman King.
But the reckoning quickly arrived. In 2022, Netflix announced a quarterly subscriber loss for the first time in more than a decade. Wall Street panicked; within hours, Netflix kissed over $54 billion goodbye. Investors realized what many top execs already knew: The streaming industry was debt-ridden and unsustainable. As earnings reports demonstrated, power brokers had failed to conjure a financial model that could support their content spending. Pressure to balance the books has since catalyzed the slashing at major studios, and hastened the deluge of TV shows canceled or off-loaded for the sake of tax savings. Dependable IP, or “intellectual property,” like Batman, has become the default, leaving less room for new ideas from diverse creators.
Today, Hollywood is dealing with the fallout. Well before this year’s WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, the weather was turning: The box office has yet to fully bounce back from COVID declines. Budgets for film and TV are set to diminish, and fewer projects will likely get the green light. As the Hollywood Reporter noted in October, “Nobody knows whether the business will ultimately contract by 10 percent or 50—what everybody can agree on is that less will be made everywhere.” Adds writer and producer Soo Hugh (Pachinko; The Terror), “I’m really scared for the next five years.…I think all signs point to that the bubble has burst.”
And as the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers points to the bottom line, creators are questioning its commitment to diversity: “I don’t know if these studios are going to keep the promises that they’ve made to certain communities—the Latinx community, the Asian community, all of us,” says writer, producer, and showrunner Katori Hall (P-Valley). “I truly, in my gut, don’t understand why it continues to be as difficult as it is” for female creatives, says writer and director Gina Prince-Bythewood (The Woman King; Love & Basketball). But after three decades in TV and film, she understands: “When shifts happen, women and people of color are usually on the periphery.”
Stephanie Savage, a screenwriter and producer (Gossip Girl; The O.C.), thought there would be more women. She thought it first in 2007, during a WGA meeting at the crowded Civic Center in Los Angeles, as that year’s strike kicked off its picket lines. She slipped out to the ladies’ room, anticipating a line out the door, only to encounter a row of empty stalls.
Savage thought she’d find more women 16 years later, in the summer of 2023, as strikes again brought showbiz to a halt. This time, she wasn’t wrong: There were more women hoisting signs beside her. The problem is, they were out of work again—and many of them were convinced Hollywood’s latest crisis sought to displace them further. “This larger group of people has finally had the opportunity to have access to a structure to tell their stories,” Savage says. But as entertainment writ large undergoes seismic activity, she fears these same people will be “told those stories aren’t worth anything.” Says director and producer Jess Wu Calder, “I don’t think that that’s a fair standard to put on women: that it has to be either Barbie or nothing.”
From its inception, Hollywood has built its palaces on the spoils of clever marketing. It’s not exactly perplexing, then, that the industry’s messaging around gender parity and inclusion would use similar tactics. “For years, the studios used their shadowing and mentorship programs as public relations cover to deflect criticism,” Lauzen says. “But most of those programs have involved just a handful of individuals.” Adds Seligman, “Executives want to say that they’re supporting young women, or people of color, or queer people, and that they want to tell these stories. But then when it comes time to hand an independent director their first opportunity, they don’t really trust them….It just feels fake, in terms of progress.”
Women of color, in particular, say the green lights they receive are like neglected gift baskets: topped with a flashy ribbon, but stuffed with rotting fruit. As USC’s Smith explains, films by and about women of color “receive fewer production [resources] and receive fewer marketing dollars. Their films are in fewer theaters.” The most recent Inclusion Initiative study found that the top-grossing films over the past 16 years had a ratio of 63.3 white male directors to every one woman of color. “The studio system is a reflection of Hollywood’s elitism and ability to exclude a lot of us,” says director, writer, and film professor Nikyatu Jusu (Nanny; Suicide by Sunlight). “You’re answering to people who look less and less like you.”
If women of color do manage to hurdle these obstacles, they then have to deal with executives interfering with their stories. “We want to write what we want to write—what we want to see—not what we think you want to see from us,” says writer, showrunner, and producer Janine Nabers (Swarm; Watchmen). That can’t happen if executives replace writers with robots. “AI cannot write to the voice, the culture, the experience, the nuance, the depth, the heart, the fire of a woman of color. Can’t even go near it,” says Tembi Locke, a writer and producer (From Scratch). Creator and showrunner Liz Tigelaar (Tiny Beautiful Things; Little Fires Everywhere) thinks the higher-ups should be just as worried about their own jobs: “Studio executives are as replaceable as writers—why wouldn’t we all be terrified?”
The situation is thrust into even sharper relief when a film or series fails to instantly capture buzz. “My show got canceled before it had even finished airing on the platform,” says Eliza Clark, a showrunner on Y: The Last Man. “They didn’t give it the time to grow an audience.” Her experience mirrored that of Natalie Abrams, one of three co-creators on Gotham Knights. Before the show’s first season had aired its finale, the creators and their fans learned The CW would not be moving forward with a second season. “I think about how many communities are continuing to be underserved because shows are not getting a chance,” Abrams says.
Even when a female-created film or series is successful by a studio or network’s audience engagement metrics—and, to be clear, such a standard is dubious at worst, difficult to define at best—it’s often siloed into the category of “woman stuff,” as writer and producer Attica Locke (From Scratch) labels it. “What I’ve been stunned by and hurt by is…when the work comes out, the way things are dismissed,” she says. Take the HBO hit Succession, for instance: That’s a soap, she argues. “But when the same soapy twists and turns exist within a show that has been described or perceived to be for women, I still feel that sense of, Wait, why isn’t this being taken as seriously as I want it to be?”
Maureen Ryan, a journalist and author of the 2023 book Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, is unsurprised by the turn of events. Hollywood “is always shape-shifting to find a new way to exclude people,” she says. “And it always says that it isn’t, but it always is. The forces working against greater inclusion are very powerful. But they don’t advertise—there’s not going to be the Coalition of People Against Inclusion having a big meeting.”
Still, the nearly 30 women interviewed for this story—and hundreds of others like them—are determined to ensure the current upheaval in Hollywood isn’t successful in pushing them further outside its nucleus. Even if that commitment means they must face an entertainment landscape bleaker than what they’d expected.
“I am someone who gets really angry about these things,” Ms. Marvel’s Ali says. “I get angry about a lack of parity. I get angry that a lot of people just don’t care. I also get angry about how performative so much of this is.” But, she continues, “We also have to be hopeful. The gains we made before? They might contract. But if we stand fast, they’ll expand again.”
When director and producer Lesli Linka Glatter (Love & Death; Mad Men), current president of the Directors Guild of America, began her film career in 1985, she was mostly mentored by men. “There weren’t any women,” she recalls. “Now there is a girls’ club helping other women.” Director and producer Mimi Leder (On the Basis of Sex; The Morning Show), who began her career in the late 1980s, has felt that difference. “I feel the landscape has gotten much better for women,” she says. “It’s much more acceptable these days to hire women.”
Research shows the number of women behind the scenes on both TV and film sets increases considerably when another woman has a position of power on that set. But hiring women takes intentional work, says producer Deborah Snyder (Wonder Woman; Aquaman; Justice League): “You have to make a conscious effort to hire women. And hopefully, someday it will be unconscious. But we’re not there yet.”
Asked what the future of Hollywood should look like, writer and producer Gloria Calderón Kellett (One Day at a Time; Jane the Virgin) urges studios, streamers, and networks to consider America’s population. “What are the dynamics of this country, and how do we make Hollywood exactly that?” she asks. “If we are supposed to be telling stories that are a reflection of the culture, we’ve got to do a better job.”
Debora Cahn (left) with actress Keri Russell on the set of The Diplomat.
Attica Locke (left), Tembi Locke (center), and director Nzingha Stewart on the set of From Scratch.
Given the tenor of frustration imbuing these conversations, we anticipated a number of the women interviewed for this story might express burnout or despair. But only two shared any inkling of desire to exit the industry. The others expressed their commitment to continuing the work. (Jokes producer Jessica Rhoades: “Yeah, the ground is shaking. But I grew up in California, so I’m kind of used to that.”)
Writer and producer Debora Cahn (The Diplomat, Homeland) likens such work to turning a glacier. “We’re turning it, but it’s been going in a particular direction for hundreds of years,” she says. “So there’s just a lot of ground to cover.” Adds Pachinko’s Hugh, “The next generation, they’re ready. It’s just whether or not they’re given an opportunity.”
It was Christmastime 2016, and Lauren Neustadter, then an executive at Fox, was seven months pregnant when she got her opportunity: an incoming FaceTime from Reese Witherspoon. The actress wanted to gauge Neustadter’s interest in heading up TV and film at her budding media company, Hello Sunshine. Earlier in her career, someone had told Neustadter she didn’t have the necessary knack for producing hits. Witherspoon disagreed. “She saw something producer-esque in me, and she remembered it, and that was what made her make the phone call,” Neustadter says. “And that changed my life forever.”
In the years since her hiring, Hello Sunshine projects—such as Daisy Jones & the Six and Little Fires Everywhere—have broken viewership records and won a number of major awards. “Sometimes people will tell women stories about what we are and aren’t capable of,” Neustadter says. “And as hard as it is, it’s essential that we don’t believe them.”
26 Women Creatives and Experts on What’s Next for Hollywood—And What More Must Be Done
Natalie Abrams
“[Studios and streamers] really stopped taking chances and [are] just picking up stuff they thought, Okay, this will be the surefire thing. And then you have one shot. If you don’t explode out of the gate, you don’t get to continue telling your stories. I get it. I understand. This is a business. But it doesn’t mean my heart’s not in it.”
Bisha K. Ali
“If you’re in the desert and you haven’t had water and suddenly someone gives some of you a drop of water, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, look at this delicious drop of water.’ But really the tap should be on. I think we’ve been starving for something, and now we have more of it. But actually, when you look at the numbers, it’s not great.”
Debora Cahn
“When I was coming up, somebody would say ‘girl writer’ in a writers’ room, and there was no question of who was being referred to, because there was always only one. So that is no longer considered an acceptable minimum, which is a not insignificant change. There’s still a long way to go.”
Jess Wu Calder
“I think I have a fear that only the most extremely successful will sustain. I don’t think that that’s a fair standard to put on women, that it has to be either Barbie or nothing. As excited as I am for that [movie] and as happy I am that that movie is out there, proving everybody wrong, I do have that fear that for the middle ground—the ones that are trying to break through—that [the industry] won’t be as supportive as it has been the last couple of years.”
Gloria Calderón Kellett
“We’re all going to have to reassess how we’ve been doing this [business], how there maybe was too much TV, how we need to focus a little bit. Everyone is going to reassess, and I worry that in that reassessment, the progress that we’ve made will start to go backwards. We’ve worked so hard to get to this moment. I think, honestly, we’ve made things so much better.”
Eliza Clark
“I think that it takes a certain amount of delusion to be a professional artist. The advice that I give, especially to younger women, is that no one is ever going to tell you that you belong there, so you really have to feel it. And there are so many mediocre men in the business who feel like they belong there. So we just have to keep on keeping on.”
Lesli Linka Glatter
“All I’ve ever wanted for the film business is that it’s an equal playing field for all. It shouldn’t be harder for our daughters to direct than for our sons. I love being a storyteller, and I’m grateful to be doing it, but [the industry] needs to be open to all voices. There is plenty of room at the table for all kinds of voices, and it only makes us better.”
Katori Hall
“At the end of the day, it’s really about money. Are the resources being shared equally? And I will say, as someone who has seen the budgets side by side, it ain’t equal. On the stage of Hollywood, there are all these gestures of, ‘Look at what we’re doing: We have this diversity initiative, and we have this Black female director that we’re championing, and we’ve given her an opportunity.’ And then, behind closed doors, it’s like, ‘Well, what’s her budget, compared to the white guy whose movie you just green lit?’”
Jenny Han
“When there’s so much money at stake, things tend to be more intense. The best comparison I can make is: When I look at the publishing industry, there’s less money changing hands. So people are maybe more willing to take a chance on a small book that they think could find a small audience, but that they think should be published, because there’s literary merit to it. When we’re talking about $25,000 compared to $25 or $40 million [on a film or TV project], it’s just very different stakes.”
Soo Hugh
“It goes back to the number of seats at the table, right? It’s always much easier if there’s a thousand seats. Now, if this inflection point [in Hollywood] takes away 200 of those seats, I just hope it’s not for the people coming up. The work to do is by the people who have the power to put the chairs out, right? So I hope that the people who have the power, that they’re not taking the chairs away from the people [coming up].”
Nikyatu Jusu
“I have a radical optimism, because I dig into the archives often, and we’re not the first to navigate anything. In every era, you have women who are trying to penetrate industries and livelihoods that excluded them. I think it’s important to hold your inspiration close and dig into history and remind yourself that you’re not an anomaly. A lot of struggle and strife is going to have to happen for us to make it to the other side of this change, but it does feel like we’re burning this shit down to start over again more intelligently, and whoever’s left standing on the other side, we’re all going to help rebuild this to something that reflects our reality.”
Dr. Martha Lauzen
“It’s not that Hollywood does not take risks; Hollywood takes risks every single day. But, traditionally, they have taken risks on those individuals who look like them demographically. I think we have to make a distinction between remedies that might make us feel better about things versus remedies that are actually going to work.”
Mimi Leder
“I think it’s really hard for anyone to get anything done [in Hollywood], even though there’s more opportunities to get things done. I think you have to fight tooth and nail with so much passion to get your story told. And do I think it’s easier for men? Yeah, it is. Women have to work twice as hard, period.”
Attica Locke
“The chatter that I’m hearing amongst people of color—and even some white folks who understand the value of a diverse [writers’] room—is, ‘We just not going to go.’ There is a felt sense of, Hey, we recognize progress has been made. We’re not going to just cede that now.”
Tembi Locke
“I feel like [even] in the often zero-sum approach that is capitalism in Hollywood, the pie is large enough for everybody. There’s a slice for everybody. It’s just a matter of everybody being willing to understand that. And I think the strike [forced] some major entities to begin to think about this as a global big pie that we all can live off of. It doesn’t have to shrink. It can actually stay the same size, and we can just slice it up differently.”
Janine Nabers
“I think if we really get what we’re asking for, you’re going to have Black people writing these event TV [shows], like Succession. You know what I mean? That’s the future. Everyone is saying, ‘We’re capable of this. People of color are capable of this. Women are capable of this. Queer people are capable of this. Our stories matter. Pay us what we’re worth, and let us get to work.’”
Lauren Neustadter
“This work that we’re doing is so important and so inspiring, and we all want to keep doing it. So let’s always keep our eye on the horizon, and let’s always keep climbing, because I think we’re capable of such greatness and such extraordinary things. I think hope is an essential ingredient inside of all of us, and we can’t lose it.”
Gina Prince-Bythewood
“I say it often, and I’ll keep saying it: Talent has no gender. Women, we are very good at directing, and what directing is is all-encompassing. You have to make 1,000 decisions; you have to have vision; you have to be maternal; you have to be tough and vulnerable. Women were built for this. Yet we have to keep proving that we can handle it, and it’s annoying.”
Jessica Rhoades
“There’s a comradery that comes from being in the trenches, doing the thing that feels impossible against all odds. There’s a pride that comes with it. And so, it’s a strange question to ask ourselves: Would it be more maintainable, sustainable, and healthy if we didn’t push everyone to those places? And I think the majority would say, ‘Yes, that would be better. Let’s do that.’”
Maureen Ryan
“Most women I know [in Hollywood], especially if they’re from historically excluded communities, are still being shut out of meaningful leadership roles. Or if they get those meaningful leadership roles, they don’t last long. And if they do last longer than a hot minute, the amount of scrutiny and second-guessing that they endure is just beyond anything you could possibly imagine. And so that in itself is wearing. A lot of women bought into this idea that if they just plugged away long enough, they would get that reward, and then they’re still being shut out.”
Stephanie Savage
“When I started, just being a woman and being successful at your job was already so overwhelming that your energy went into that. Just being successful yourself was, kind of, how you were creating change in the world. And now that there are more women, now that there are more people of color who are working at the highest levels, there’s an opportunity to do more. And to say more.”
Emma Seligman
“I understand there’s always more cooks in the kitchen once you reach a professional level where there’s more money. But sometimes I think that female, or queer, or POC directors are just being hired to show progress, but they’re not actually being given the reins to tell their own stories, or to direct the stories that they’re hired to do, with the power that any other director [would have to] be able to do their job properly.”
Rachel Shukert
“I think Hollywood is very reflective of larger society. It doesn’t operate in this vacuum. And I think that what’s been seen again and again and again throughout history is: Every time there’s incremental progress for women, there’s a step back.”
Dr. Stacy Smith
“None of this is about a shortage of talent that happens to be historically marginalized. This is all about the blocking of access and opportunity. Much of it is explicit. People are going to want you to believe it’s implicit bias. That’s not really the problem, because the nomenclature is oppressive. When you can put in financial terms why a particular product with a particular group as the focus ‘won’t sell,’ that oppression and discrimination is no longer implicit bias. Those are very explicit biases.”
Deborah Snyder
“As a producer, the biggest thing I can change is who I hire. And that’s a lot of power. Hopefully, then the people that I hire get experience and then they will hire [women] in turn, and it builds. I don’t think it is going to change overnight. I think we would like it to, but I don’t think that’s realistic.”
Liz Tigelaar
“I’m often on a text chain with four other showrunners, all women, and we ask each other questions all the time. We’re like, ‘This thing just happened in this meeting. What did you do?’ It’s just this support system, being able to vet people with them. The women I know are really able to celebrate each other’s successes. I think we all know that there’s plenty to go around, that one person’s success doesn’t take away from our own success.”
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Natalie Abrams was one of three writers on Gotham Knights. The story has been updated to reflect that she was one of three co-creators.
A version of this article appears in the December 2023/January 2024 issue of ELLE.
Culture Writer
Lauren Puckett-Pope is a staff culture writer at ELLE, where she primarily covers film, television and books. She was previously an associate editor at ELLE.
Juliana Ukiomogbe is the Assistant Editor at ELLE. Her work has previously appeared in Interview, i-D, Teen Vogue, Nylon, and more.