UCLA/Writers Guild of America Report:

by Jonathan Handel – Hollywood Reporter – 26 March 2013

Despite some slow progress over the last decade, women and minorities remain
dramatically underrepresented on TV writing staffs, according to a UCLA/WGA West
report released Tuesday. The document – the 2013 WGAW TV Staffing Report – was prepared for the WGAW by Darnell Hunt, a UCLA sociologist who is director of the
Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies.

The numbers are daunting: minorities are underrepresented on TV staffs by a factor
of 2 to 1 in comparison to their percentage of the population. Among executive
producers, women are underrepresented by 2 to 1 and minorities by 5 to 1.
“In the Hollywood entertainment industry, unfortunately, there has all too often
existed a disconnect between the writers hired to tell the stories and an America
that’s increasingly diverse with each passing day,” Hunt said.

The report looked at 190 shows on 28 broadcast and cable networks, employing 1,722 writers. “We can’t tell the whole story if only half of us write it,” said WGA West
president Christopher Keyser at a morning event at which the report was presented.
There are signs of progress, albeit slow. Minority representation doubled over the
last decade (2011-12 season compared with 1999-2000). But during that same
period, female representation inched up a mere 5% – a rate of increase so sluggish
that parity of men won’t be achieved for another 42 years unless faster progress is
made.

Hunt remarked that he had considered subtitling the report “Pockets of Promise,
Minimal Progress.” The report also looked at age-related issues, and found that for the first time, writers over 40 have over 50% of all staff positions. On the other hand, nearly a third of shows had no writers over 50, suggesting a sharp drop-off occurs.

The report didn’t look at LGBT issues because of the difficulty of obtaining data, said
Hunt.

Rutgers business school professor Nancy DiTomaso, author of the new book The
American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality Without Racism, told The Hollywood
Reporter that the project-based and who-knows-who nature of the entertainment
industry accentuates the difficulty that diverse writers have in breaking into
established networks.

“It is not just a friendship network, but one that is often based on neighborhood,
race/ethnic or religious groups, people who went to the same school, attend the same
church, who are associated with the same institutions and so on,” she said. “The
impact of networking in this field and others is the perpetuation of inequality and
often the opportunity for some people to build skills that others are denied.”
As Hunt said, entertainment is “a very relationship-oriented business.” DiTomaso
was not involved in the UCLA/WGA research.

One attempt to change the dynamic is the WGAW Writer Access Project, which
attempts to open doors for diverse writers by identifying diverse writers with television staffing experience and making samples of their work available to
showrunners, producers, executives, agents and managers.