Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams — whose talent and box office draw are worth a pretty penny — were just flat out given two percentage points less of the back end of American Hustle than each of the dudes in the film.
And those are only the most famous and beautiful and talented women in Hollywood we happened to hear about in recent months. Most pay disparities are pretty well hidden. But what about the other ways Hollywood demonstrates how sexist it is against women trying to break into screenwriting, directing, producing, and all of the other positions? It’s so much worse.
Only 9 percent of the top 250 domestic grossing films of 2012 were directed by women, according to a study by The Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film, based at San Diego University. For other behind-the-scenes roles, women make up only 18 percent. And that has only increased 1 percent since 1998!
The same disparity is seen in sales of scripts. Researcher Susana Orozco who went through every single spec script sales from 1991 and 2012 and found that between 1991 and 2000, women wrote 14 percent of spec scripts sold. By the last few years she studied up to 2012, only 9 percent of the scripts sold were written by women!
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