Regina King’s ‘50% Women’ Goal Faces a Hard Reality in Hollywood

(Bloomberg) -- When Regina King accepted the Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe for her role in “If Beale Street Could Talk,” she vowed that within the next two years all the projects she produced would be staffed by 50 percent women and challenged the rest of Hollywood to do the same.

That's a heavy lift. The movie industry is still dominated by men, who made up nearly three-quarters of the producers for the top 300 movies released from 2016 to 2018, according to the annual report from the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. White women represented 16.3 percent of producers; women of color, just 1.6 percent.

In more technical and post-production roles, women were even more scarce. In the hundreds of movies released between 2016 and 2018:

• Eight had women as directors of photography
• Five had female camera operators
• Fewer than one in six editors were women
• 2.3 percent of composers were female

When the data is broken out by race, it's clear that women of color are even less likely to be in these roles. Less than 2 percent of editors, production designers and producers were non-white women. Not a single director of photography was a women of color for the top films over the past two years.

King wasn't specific about her goal, and there are other parts of film production that are dominated by women, in particular hair and makeup departments. Costume designers and casting directors are also often female.

“It's going to be tough to make sure that everything that I produce is 50 percent women,” King said onstage Sunday. “I just challenge anyone out there who is in a position of power -- not just in our industry, in all industries -- I would challenge you to challenge yourselves to stand with us in solidarity and do the same.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Jordyn Holman in New York at jholman19@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Janet Paskin at jpaskin@bloomberg.net, Nick Turner

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