Women Are Directing More TV Shows, but Minorities Aren’t, Report Says

Pressure on Hollywood to be more inclusive is resulting in far better overall gains for female television directors than for nonwhite professionals.

According to a report released Wednesday by the Directors Guild of America, the percentage of TV episodes directed by women hit an all-time high in the 2017-18 season: A quarter had female directors, and women directed 14 percent more episodes than they did the previous year. But gains made by people of color were flat: Twenty-four percent of the nearly 4,300 episodes analyzed were directed by minorities, an increase of just 1 percent compared with the 2016-17 season.

Some of the bigger, traditional studios scored far better on their diversity report cards than their streaming and cable counterparts.

The Disney-ABC Television Group, home to “How to Get Away With Murder,” “black-ish” and “Fresh Off the Boat,” topped the list for diverse directors. Of the 574 episodes from the company’s 36 shows, nearly 52 percent had female or nonwhite directors. At both 20th Century Fox and Lionsgate, which placed second and third, the comparable figures were just below 48 percent.

By contrast, just 32 percent of Netflix series episodes and 31 percent of Amazon episodes were directed by women or people of color. Viacom, home to Comedy Central, BET, MTV and VH1, came last, with 30.5 percent.

The Directors Guild blamed hiring of insiders for frustrating the progress of female and nonwhite directors. In an earlier report, the guild found that almost 70 percent of hundreds of first-time TV directing jobs went to insiders — actors, producers, writers or crew members affiliated with a given series, three-quarters of whom were white men. The “gifting out” of the jobs created a bottleneck effect, the study found, and those insiders went on to develop their directing careers just 24 percent of the time.

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For the full report on diversity hiring, go to dga.org.