Barbie might’ve dominated the box office in stilettos last summer, but you’ll be shocked to learn that Hollywood still has a long way to go when it comes to inclusion among top directors. According to a new study from USC Annenberg’s Inclusion Initiative, that applies to both gender and race.
USC’s study examines the 100 films with the highest U.S. gross—and in 2023, Variety reports, women directed only 14 of them. That represents 12.1%—which is only a doll hair higher than last year’s 9%. The numbers for racial diversity aren’t much better. The study found that the top 100 films from 2023 included 26 directors from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, which works out to 22.4%. That’s also a slight bump from 2022’s 20.7%, but in the context of past trends, it’s not terribly impressive.
Last year’s USC report included figures for each year dating from 2007 to 2022. Since 2007, the highest representation women have achieved came in 2020 at 15%, and in 2021, the figure dropped to 12.7%. So while 2023 brought a slight rebound for female directors from the year before, Hollywood still has yet to recover the small amount of ground it had already achieved on that front.
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Racial and ethnic diversity figures have been inching slightly higher over the years. In 2007, women directed 2.7% of the top-grossing 100 films, while directors from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds helmed 12.5% of them. Predictably, however, non-white women seem to have received the smallest sliver of the pie; according to last year’s report, only 21 non-white women directed any of the 1,488 films examined from 2007 to 2022—which works out to an embarrassing 1.3%.
This year, Variety reports, only four women of color directed any of the top 100 films. Three of them (Joy Ride director Adele Lim, Past Lives director Celine Song, and Wish’s Fawn Veerasunthorn) were Asian, and one of them, The Marvels director Nia DaCosta, is Black. The study’s authors call Hollywood’s vows to bolster inclusion in its hiring processes “performative acts,” Variety reports, and also “not real steps towards fostering change.”
Of course, none of this should come as a surprise. Each year, USC’s studies have alerted us to basically the same thing. 2016’s report, released in the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy one year before, called out an “epidemic of invisibility” and called the industry a “straight, white, boys’ club.” The damning statistics are endless, if you care to look for them, and while Hollywood has made some progress, the gains achieved are still laughably insufficient.
Women make up one-half of the U.S. population, and yet we’re still lucky if more than 10% of a given year’s major films come from a female director. Women from under-represented racial and ethnic backgrounds comprise 20.6% of our population, according to last year’s USC study, while men of the same backgrounds make up 20.1%. And yet, their combined director’s share from 2007 to 2022 came in at a paltry 15.3% of 1,488 films.
At some point, Hollywood is going to have to stop making empty promises and put its money where its mouth is—and if box office-shattering films like Barbie, Get Out, and Black Panther are any indication, there’s plenty of money to be made in doing so. The only question that remains is how many hits it’s going to take for studio heads to take notice.
