Diversity in television and film writing fails to improve

The Writers Guild of America West has released a report that shows that women and minority writers have made little overall progress in their quest for fair employment and earnings in Hollywood. Unfortunately, the report showed little positive change, since minority and female employment and earning have remained relatively constant as of late.

Although the report did point out minor advances made by women and minorities in some sectors, its results made clear that white male writers continue to be a disproportionately dominant portion of Hollywood’s writing work force.

The "2007 Hollywood Writers Report— Whose Stories Are We Telling?" analyzed minority and gender based data and examined employment and earning trends through 2005. And despite the fact that more than 30% of Americans are minorities, the report found that writers of color continue to account for less than 10% of employed television writers.

Because the study analyzed data from 2005, the low numbers of minority and female television writers will probably get worse before they get better. The recent merger of UPN and the WB into the new CW Network (which occurred in 2006) resulted in the cancellation of several minority-themed situation comedies that employed a disproportionate share of minority television writers.

However, minority writers fared much worse in film, where their share of total employment has been cemented in at just 6 percent for many years.

In addition, the report stated that the earnings disparity for minority writers in television widened by $6,000 between 2004 and 2005. The overall median earnings for minority TV writers in 2005 was $78,107, compared to $97,956 for White writers.

In film, the earnings gap increased by almost $2,000 for minority film writers (between 2004 and 2005). Median earnings for minority film writers in 2005 were $66,666 and were $77,537 for white writers.

For women writers, employment remained unchanged in 2005. The overall employment of women writers in 2005 was 25 percent and for women TV writers it was 27 percent. The one positive note in the report was that women writers narrowed the television median earnings gap to the point of near elimination, as women writers earned only $300 less than their male counterparts in 2005.

In order for the television and film industries to make a serious change and become more diverse, they must aggressively recruit minority and female writers. Because right now, most of regular network television, with the exception of some of the CW network’s programming, is written by predominantly white males who may or may not have a grasp of the minority experience.

Hopefully, more television networks will follow the example of Fox television, which earlier this year made a public commitment to hire more minority writers. If more Hollywood companies make a public commitment to increasing diversity among their own film and television writers, we will definitely see the results on both the small and big screens.

A public commitment to diversity will provide the accountability necessary to spur real workplace diversity growth in this highly visible and influential industry.