Earlier this year, the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA released their 2019 Hollywood Diversity Report. Titled, “Old Story, New Beginning,” the report examined 12 different jobs among the creators, directors and top-billed cast of the top movies for 2017 as well as 1,316 broadcast television, cable and digital shows from the 2016 to 2017 programming season.
According to the report, in each year’s 200 top-grossing films, the number of women directors nearly doubled from 2016 to 2017. Even with this increase, women directors only took up 21 spots among the 167 English-language films from 2017’s top 200, or just 12.6% of the total.
In addition, people of color accounted for 19.8% of the leads in top films for 2017, an increase from the 13.9% figure posted in 2016. The report stated that “despite notable gains for the group since the previous report (particularly in television), people of color remained underrepresented on every industry employment front in 2016-17.”
Dr. Darnell Hunt, dean of social sciences at UCLA, also pointed out that new evidence supports findings from earlier reports that America’s increasingly diverse audiences prefer diverse film and television content.
