The film industry likes to present itself as a ruthless meritocracy in which money talks and success is rewarded. A study covering almost 200,000 films tells a different story. Even when films written by women make more money, the largest production budgets and most powerful directing positions remain overwhelmingly reserved for men.
The research, published in Frontiers in Communication, examined films released between 1994 and 2023. These included theatrical and non-theatrical releases, with budget and worldwide revenue data available for a smaller group of more than 4,200 films.
Progress across those three decades was painfully slow.
“The share of films crediting at least one woman as a director or screenwriter increased from 21.5 percent in 1994 to 29.4 percent in 2023. After nearly 30 years, fewer than one in three films included a woman in either role,” said study author Anja Huwiler, a researcher at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.
The financial results make the exclusion harder for the industry to explain away. Films with a woman screenwriter but no woman director produced a median profit of about $35.9 million, compared with $26.8 million for films written and directed entirely by men. That’s a difference of 34 percent, despite the two groups having similar production budgets.
The same films achieved a median return on investment of 1.1, 25 percent above the 0.88 recorded by male-only productions. Films involving women in both writing and directing achieved a similar return to male-only productions while working with around half as much money.
“Films with a woman screenwriter but no woman director had 34 percent higher median profits than films with only men in those roles, despite similar budgets,” Huwiler said. “Yet 39 of the 44 films in the top 1 percent of production budgets were male-only productions, and none involved a woman director.”
The disparity became even more glaring among the industry’s most expensive productions. Male-only teams accounted for 74.8 percent of films in the top 10 percent of budgets, 78.6 percent of the top 5 percent and 88.6 percent of the top 1 percent. Across the entire 30-year period, not one film involving a woman director reached the top 1 percent of production budgets.
“Among the 44 films in the top 1 percent of production budgets, the five films written but not directed by a woman had a median profit about $113 million higher than male-only films, despite having slightly lower median budgets,” said Huwiler.
Among films in the top 5 percent of budgets, those written but not directed by women made a median profit of $556 million, around $86 million more than male-only productions. In the top 10 percent, the difference was still larger: roughly $452 million against a male-only median about $134 million lower.
This doesn’t prove that women are inherently better filmmakers. The study is observational, and the small number of women admitted to these positions may itself affect the results. When an oppressed group faces greater barriers to entry, those who get through are often required to demonstrate far more ability than the mediocre members of the dominant group. The figures can’t establish that employing a woman caused any particular film to make more money.
What they do establish is that the exclusion of women can’t honestly be defended as a commercial necessity. The industry continues to concentrate its largest resources in male hands even when its own financial results provide no basis for doing so.
That isn’t as mysterious as it may appear. Capitalism isn’t a machine that automatically finds the most talented person and rewards them. Capital is controlled by real people operating through established institutions, personal networks and inherited relations of power. Studio executives, financiers and producers don’t make decisions outside society. They carry its class relations, patriarchal assumptions and social hierarchies into the boardroom with them.
“The extreme uncertainty of film financing can make familiar people and established ways of working feel safer, especially when decision-makers are risk- or loss-averse. This can reinforce the status quo even when the financial evidence points elsewhere,” Huwiler said.
What the industry calls “risk” is itself shaped by power. A man can be handed an enormous budget because men directing enormous productions has been made normal. A woman seeking the same resources is treated as an uncertain experiment. Success by a man confirms the wisdom of employing men, while success by a woman is more easily treated as an exception. Failure doesn’t fall equally either: individual women are made to stand for women as a group, while unsuccessful men remain individuals who can often move on to the next project.
The familiar circle isn’t just a collection of bad habits. It’s one of the ways ruling institutions reproduce themselves. Those who already control money and appointments tend to promote people who look, speak and behave like those already in charge. The result is a self-reinforcing system in which male dominance becomes its own justification. Men are considered safer because men have more experience with large productions, while men continue to gain that experience because they’re considered safer.
Following the emergence of the #MeToo movement in 2017, the proportion of films involving women continued to increase. The study, however, found no lasting acceleration in the rate of growth. Public scandal forced the industry to present itself as changing, but its distribution of money and authority remained largely intact. Capitalist institutions are skilled at absorbing criticism into publicity campaigns, diversity schemes and individual appointments without surrendering control over production.
The domination of film by large media corporations also gives the issue an imperialist dimension. Hollywood isn’t merely a collection of artists making entertainment. It’s a concentrated culture industry whose products circulate across the world, backed by the distribution networks and market power of US capital. It helps shape which stories can be told on a mass scale and which assumptions about society, class and US power are presented as ordinary common sense.
Giving more women access to writing and directing positions doesn’t automatically change the class character of that industry. A film written or directed by a woman can reproduce bourgeois and imperialist ideology just as readily as one made by a man. Installing individual women at the top of existing corporations isn’t the same thing as liberating working-class women, nor does it give film workers collective control over what they produce.
But it would be equally wrong to dismiss women’s exclusion as superficial “representation politics.” Directing and screenwriting bring income, authority, professional status and some control over cultural production. Denying women access to those positions is a material expression of patriarchal power. Capitalism doesn’t stand apart from that oppression. It inherits it, uses it and continually reproduces it through the institutions capital controls.
“I think one value of this study is that it looks at the issue through a financial lens, not only as a question of representation,” concluded Huwiler. “Studios and investors care about whether their investment decisions are consistent with the financial outcomes they observe. My results provide a reason to examine existing hiring, greenlighting, and budgeting practices.”
That financial lens exposes a real contradiction, but it can’t provide the standard by which women’s worth is measured. Women shouldn’t need to generate higher profits than men to be considered worthy of the same opportunities. Equal access to enriching corporate shareholders would still leave the ownership of the industry, the exploitation of its workforce and Hollywood’s role in US cultural domination untouched.
The study’s profit estimates also exclude marketing and distribution costs and don’t account for every source of revenue. Its financial data mainly covers US theatrical releases, while the number of films involving women directors was small. Gender was inferred from first names across the wider dataset, which may have led to some women being missed. The precise financial differences should therefore be treated cautiously.
The overall pattern is much harder to dismiss. Women remain shut out of the biggest budgets even after repeatedly demonstrating that they can deliver the returns studios claim to care about. Capital may speak constantly of efficiency and merit, but the people who control it are also protecting an established social order. When profit and patriarchal power point in different directions, the film industry has repeatedly shown that it’s willing to leave money on the table to keep control in familiar hands.
