Katherine Biek
When It Comes To Numbers For Women In Film, It Might As Well Be 1998
A recent study looked at hundreds of top-grossing movies and found women made up 17 percent of those working on films behind the scenes.
LEARN MOREPosted: 12:27 p.m. EST Feb 3, 2017
After the 2017 Oscar nominations were announced, the awards show was applauded for recognizing so many people of color in the acting categories.
But it turns out, there's not much diversity behind the camera.
Researchers from the University of Southern California looked at the directors of 1,000 top-grossing films from the past decade. Just 5 percent of them were black. And only 3 percent were Asian.
What's more, the majority of those directors were male. The study found for every one woman directing a film, there were 24 men doing the same.
About 80 percent of those female directors only directed one top-grossing movie in the decade studied. That statistic rose to 83 percent when looking at female directors of color.
The top-performing director of the more than 1,000 looked at was "Madea" creator Tyler Perry with 14 movies. The most films made by a female director was Anne Fletcher with four. She's best known for "The Proposal."
2017 marks the seventh year in a row that no women were nominated for best director at the Oscars.
In fact, only four women have ever been up for the award in the show's 88-year history. Kathryn Bigelow is the only one to have ever won — for directing "The Hurt Locker" in 2010.
No women of color have ever been nominated for best director at the Oscars. Of the 1,114 directors the University of Southern California study looked at, only seven were minority women — three were black, three were Asian and one was Latina.
