User:Artodd/sandbox2

Women Documentarians
Women documentarians make up around thirty percent of the population of directors in the documentary film industry, worldwide. (1) The academic field studying women involved in film is gradually growing, and in correlation the number of studies regarding this topic is increasing.

Gender Gap in Documentary Filmmaking
The number of female documentarians compared to male documentarians is significantly lower, as is the case in many industries. This statistic is tracked annually by San Diego University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, which produces many large studies pertaining to women and film. This center is highly regarded among film scholars as well as practitioners. The center’s advisory board is composed of women active in the industry except for the executive director who is an academic. One of their studies has been tracking women's involvement in the top-grossing films for the last twenty years. The most recently released version of the study, "The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind-the-Scenes Employment of Women on the Top 100, 250, and 500 Films of 2017," notes: "By genre, the largest percentage of women, relative to men, worked in documentaries (30%), followed by comedies (23%), dramas (22%), sci-fi features (20%), animated features (19%), horror features (18%), and action features (13%)." (1)

Compared to the Wikipedia gender gap, (4) the gender gap in the film industry, especially the documentary industry, greatly skews the representation of public information. The world’s female population is 49.5 percent, according to the statistics provided by the World Bank Group.(5) As a genre, documentaries serve to hold up a mirror to society. But because only thirty percent of documentaries released have women involved in their production, the majority of documentaries do not accurately or fully reflect various cultural, political and societal issues relevant to half the world’s population. This disparity between the number of men and women working in the documentary field leads to and perpetuates the underrepresentation of issues pertaining to women. It also creates systemic professional obstacles for women who pursue careers as documentarians because they have fewer role models and mentors with whom they can relate and network. Because the problem of gender disparity in the film industry is so widespread and deeply entrenched in the culture, more and more film scholars, many of them female, are producing studies dedicated to tracking this disparity. Two professors whose scholarship addresses this imbalance are Shelley Cobb, an associate professor of Film at the University of Southampton, and Linda Ruth Williams, professor of Film Studies in the College of Humanities at the University of Exeter, UK. Together they published an article in Sight and Sound—an international film magazine—in which they make the argument that while it's “no secret” that women have been marginalized in the film industry, the industry can be persuaded to make significant changes. The article refers to their joint project, “Calling the Shots: Women and Contemporary UK Film Culture 2000-2015,” whose purpose is to count how many women worked on British films in key production roles between 2000-2015. Their data is fleshed out with interviews of 50 female filmmakers. (6)

Film Festivals and the Gender Gap in Documentary Filmmaking
The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film published another study titled "Indie Women," which pertains to gender disparity in the industry. This study closely examines 23 of the most prestigious film festivals to determine how women in the industry were being treated as opposed to men. The results were dismal, though female documentarians did a bit better than female directors of feature-length narrative films in terms of the proportion of women's work being screened at the various festivals. Upon the study’s publication, Martha Lauzen, the executive director of the center, released an official statement with the grim observation that “The numbers have yet to reflect any sea change or seismic shift for women working on independent films.” Lauzen’s statement about numbers is backed up by the strength of the study’s research, which is extremely data-driven, as one can see from this methodological note: “In total, 'Indie Women' considers 10,758 credits on 991 films in 2017-18, and over 69,000 credits on almost 7,000 films over the period of 2008 to 2018.” (2) This study is particularly valuable to those seeking information about women working in documentaries, as it has an entire section breaking down the employment numbers of women specifically working in documentary filmmaking as opposed to other genres of film. Those women who are successful at overcoming the systemic barriers to entering the field still face systemic limitations, as documented in scholarly studies. Stacy Smith, who is an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California, published a study that analyzed the systemic hurdles women in contemporary independent film confront today. The study examines what happens to the careers of female directors after they premiere their work at the Sundance Film Festival. Smith and her team evaluate “the types of films, distribution deals, and exhibition patterns of male and female U.S. Dramatic Competition directors.” (3). This intense gender disparity has created a new spike of feminist activism in the documentary world that emerged in the 1990’s. Kelly Hankin, a professor of film and media studies at the University of Redlands, explores the importance of this new genre of documentaries in her article published in the NWSA Journal, now called Feminist Formations. It featured diverse female filmmakers and sought to contribute to activism that would inspire other female filmmakers, particularly young ones, to “imagine their own potential as filmmakers.” The article focuses on the importance of film as a tool of activism for women to use in their fight for equality in the world of film. The author implores readers to expand their notion of what feminist activist media looks like. (7)

Women Making Change in the Documentary Industry
While history often does not tell it this way, a woman was the first to broach the idea of a narrative movie displaying a personal story. Alice Guy Blache released a one-minute long movie in 1896, breaking the record for the longest movie at that time in history. The male perspective often erases Blache and instead tells the story of Robert J Flaherty releasing a staged “documentary,” “Nanook of the North,” more than twenty years after Blache. (8) There is a great deal of evidence that his wife, Frances H. Flaherty provided him so much help that she was actually the co-director of his movies. However, she gets zero critical acclaim, and is not even recognized as a documentarian. This thread of women being outshined by their husbands for equal work is not a singular story. Martin Johnson is recognized for many documentaries such as Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Pacific. He once stated that his wife, Osa Johnson was a “perfect partner” for him, yet she got little public recognition. Women documentarians were making waves early on in the beginning of the industry in other countries besides America. In Britain, Jill Craigie released a documentary advocating for equal pay of women and highlighting the gender gap.

Documentaries About Women’s Issues
Documentarians are often compared to storytellers, because they make movies based on their perspective on the world. To this day, our patriarchal society prevents women’s stories from being told, merely by the fact that the field is predominantly male. The fewer female storytellers, the fewer female stories being told by females. However, with the recent surge in mainstream feminism, there have been a number of documentaries delving deeper into the subject. Documentaries about the history of specific female activists exist. It is essential for important female leaders' stories to be shared because they are often erased from history.

He Named Me Malala
Director Davis Guggenheim, a man, released his documentary in 2014 detailing the life of Malala Yousafzai. This movie focuses on sharing Malala’s advocacy for equal education for women and her brave pushback against the Taliban. (9)

Dolores
Dolores Huerta was often not included in the teaching of Latin American Activism. Cesar Chavez was branded as the leader for the Latino American Rights Movement, when in reality Dolores Huerta was his partner, and did an equal amount of the work. This film re-writes history books and tells the true story of how Dolores was cheated out of the recognition she deserved. She discusses how she was judged by the media for having eleven children with three different men. She points out that the only reason she was judged for this was because she was a woman. She received more ridicule for the way she raised her children than she received credit for the immense amount of human rights work she accomplished.

Documentaries About Sexual Assault Towards Women
Many films have been made in an effort to share individual women’s stories, or to create awareness for the issue. Movies such as Audrie and Daisy, tell detailed firsthand accounts in order for the viewer to understand how deeply this crime affects individuals. Movies such as The Hunting Ground and the Invisible War comes from a more statistical approach, in that it tells the story of how this epidemic affects college campuses. These types of movies can act as advocacy films, which call to the public for acts of change.

Women Documentarians Face Greater Financial Obstacles
In Phase I of the Annenberg study (3), researchers discovered that women working in this male-centric industry "must navigate gendered financial barriers and exclusionary hiring practices as they pursue movie-making." Women working on feature films were at a much greater disadvantage than those working in documentary films.

Women working in documentaries fared much better. Another study by Stacy Smith at the Annenberg Center determined that women can enjoy much success as documentarians, but if they try to move into the realm of feature films they can't get the funding that their male counterparts can. (10) In the study, 61 percent of women answered that they experienced financial barriers including funding for their projects and problems with their personal finances. The women also reported having trouble securing funding and generating enthusiasm for films about women or underrepresented groups such as minorities. What proved to be an even greater barrier were the familial commitments many women documentarians reported. 64 percent reported that their commitments to raising their family and taking care of the household interfered with their career success. Fourteen percent reported having been hindered by gender stereotyping. However, the report does suggest some potential avenues of support and even solutions to these barriers for women in the documentary industry. These women included in the study reported that the most helpful resources to break down these barriers are female role models, and an increase of funding directly for female documentarians. Many women reported that they desired more encouragement from the film schools that they were attending. They want schools to provide more female mentors as well as regular networking events geared toward supporting women and helping them achieve success and break down barriers that have long vexed the film industry. As more female professors specialize in film studies, more female students are being encouraged to submit their work to film festivals. Women filmmakers are calling for a change, including hiring more women for production and crew, and tearing down gendered job positions. Jobs such as hair and makeup artists are often viewed as a woman’s job, but by taking the gender stereotype away, barriers for both genders would be broken.

Women Documentarians Have More Success in Other Countries than U.S.
According to the October 2015 Annenberg study, women documentarians in countries other than the U.S. were 40 percent likely to be “helmers” (in the top position) as opposed to 30 percent likely in the U.S. The study counted films with multiple countries involved “as other countries” but if the U.S. was involved it wasn’t counted as “other countries.”