The Invibible Woman

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THE

INVISIBLE WOMAN By Beryl Richards Director, Vice Chair Directors UK, Chair DUK Women’s Working Group

For the past two years as Chair of the Women’s Working Group at Directors UK, I’ve been immersed in the cold hard reality of the lack of women directing in Britain, and I’ve seen how it’s getting worse. A few women on the board of DUK set up the working group as we thought there was a problem, as we could see few other women directors on programme credits. As a residuals collecting society we hold extensive data on all UK directors and the films and TV they have made. We realised that by doing a gender split across our data we could track the patterns of employment and chart any changes. We took a slice across the data that looked at programmes made by the BBC, ITV and the 6 large independent companies. What we found was worse than we expected, and showed a significant downward trend in the last two years. And it showed patterns of behaviour – such as a number of ‘fast track’ drama shows where producers look for new talent hiring only young men – or that women were well represented in factual TV, but largely directing shows on body image or domestic concerns rather than science and technology. There seemed to be very old-fashioned attitudes in play, surprising in an industry that sees itself as forward looking. It was a problem beyond the tastes of a few individuals, and seemed ingrained in the way the system of hiring directors works.

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