Hiring of minorities and women for stepping-stone TV directing jobs is lagging, according to a Directors Guild of America study.
The study released Wednesday focuses on “first break” jobs the guild called critical in increasing diversity in the ranks of episodic TV directors.
Of the 153 people hired during the 2015-16 season to direct their first TV episode, 15 percent were ethnic minorities – a hiring rate that has remained flat over the past seven seasons, the annual study found.
For women, there was a slight upward trend in hiring, but it was part of a fluctuation since 2012 that falls within the same stubborn range, the guild said.
Within the last three years, for example, hiring of first-time female directors fell from 23 percent to 16 percent and then returned to 23 percent, researchers found.
“To change the hiring pool, you have to change the pipeline. Year after year when we put out our TV director diversity report, the media and public are stunned that the numbers remain virtually the same,” Bethany Rooney, co-chair of the DGA Diversity Task Force, said in a statement.
“To change the hiring pool, you have to change the pipeline. Year after year when we put out our TV director diversity report, the media and public are stunned that the numbers remain virtually the same,” said Bethany Rooney, co-chair of the DGA Diversity Task Force. “But how can it change when employers hand out so many first-time director assignments as perks? If they were serious about inclusion, they would commit to do two simple things: First, look around and see that there’s already a sizable group of experienced women and minority directors ready to work and poised for success – and they would hire them. And second, they would more carefully consider these first-time directing jobs, and develop merit-based criteria for them – with an eye toward director career development. In the end, it’s all about who is a good director.”
Those responsible for hiring decisions include studios, networks and executive producers.
Looking at the period encompassing the 2009-10 through 2015-16 seasons, men represented 81 percent of new episodic directors, with women making up 19 percent, the guild said. White represented 86 percent, with minorities at 14 percent, the guild said.
From Restoring To Hopefully Preserving Multi-Camera Categories At The Emmys
When Gary Baum, ASC won his fourth career Emmy Award earlier this month, it was especially gratifying in that the honor came in a category--Outstanding Cinematography for a Multi-Camera Half-Hour Series--that had been restored thanks in part to a grass-roots initiative among cinematographers to drum up entries. Last year the category fell by the wayside when not enough multi-camera entries materialized.
In his acceptance speech, Baum appealed to the Television Academy to keep multi-camera categories alive. He later noted to SHOOT that editors also got their multi-camera recognition back in the Emmy competition this year. Baum hopes that after resurrecting multi-camera categories in 2024, such recognition will be preserved for 2025 and beyond.
A major factor in the decline of multi-camera submissions in 2023 was the move of certain childrenโs and family programming from the primetime Emmy competition to the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciencesโ (NATAS) Emmy ceremony. For DPs this meant that multi-camera programs last year were reduced to vying for just one primetime nomination slot in the more general Outstanding Cinematography for a Series (Half-Hour) category. It turned out that this single slot was filled in โ23 by a Baum-lensed episode of How I Met Your Father (Hulu).
Fast forward to this yearโs competition and Baum won for another installment of How I Met Your Father--โOkay Fine, Itโs A Hurricane,โ which turned out to be the series finale. Two of Baumโs Emmy wins over the years have been for How I Met Your Father, and thereโs a certain symmetry to them. His initial win for How I Met Your Father was for the pilot in 2022. So he won Emmys for the very first and last... Read More