For months, people have been talking about this year’s Academy Awards, in which every one of the 20 acting nominees was white. Well, the statistics in writing for television are equally lopsided when you consider race, gender and age.
The Writers Guild of America, West examined the 2013-2014 TV season and found that 1 out of every 9 shows on TV that season didn’t have a single female in its writers room. Additionally, according to the guild's study, more than a third of TV shows had no minority writers, and nearly a third of all TV series didn’t have any writers over the age of 50.
Tery Lopez, the director of diversity for the Writers Guild of America, West, spoke with The Frame's John Horn about the lack of diversity in the writers' room and what the industry can do to improve it.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
This the second time you have done this study where you look at a full season of TV shows, and you found that the trend is going in the wrong direction, is that right?
That is absolutely correct. The numbers have dropped for both women and minorities and older writers as well, but the numbers for women and minorities are staggering.
Women writers account for 20% of TV employment during the 2013-2014 TV season, which was down from 30.5% in the 2011-2012 season. Were there certain networks more at fault than others?
I wouldn't call it fault. I think it's more of a responsibility that we all have to take as an industry. That responsibility lies in the hands of networks and studios and agencies as well. It's also about the agencies and which clients are being pushed to these networks during hiring and staffing season. For the Writers' Guild, our responsibility in that is educating our show-runners and letting them know that there are women, older writers and writers of color that are accessible to them and part of the membership.
The trends are going in the wrong direction the way you guys see it. What are the steps that could be done other than calling attention to what the data says?
Our responsibility at the guild is putting on programs such as TV Access Writer Project, which is a program for minorities, women, gay and lesbian, older writers and writers with disabilities. What has happened in the past with this program, in the last six years, half of those honorees — and there's more than 60 — have gone gotten some type of work. So this is our way of trying to help these numbers grow within our union.
But you're still talking about very incremental steps. You're saying that it has to be up to organizations like your own to grow organically?
Exactly. It's our responsibility, and also the networks and studios have their programs that they put on that they're doing their part in. And now we just really need to hope that the agencies see this as a business. Our statistics [indicate] that shows that have diversity come in with high numbers. So diversity does equal good business. And with shows like this year's "Black-ish," "Fresh Off The Boat," "Cristela" and "Jane The Virgin," we are now seeing more pilots with more diversity. With that shift, we're gonna hope that it's gonna change within the writers' room as well.
You also looked at the executive producer or show-runner positions. These are the people who are really hiring the writers, and in a large part, they're also casting their shows. You found that minorities occupy just 5.5% of those positions, which was down 7.8% in 2011. So I think what happens there is that the people who are making the hiring decisions, as they become less diverse, their inclinations may be to hire less diverse writers.
That's the thought process behind it. If there were more Shonda Rhimeses, we'd see more diverse shows. Shonda is a great example. Her staffs are very diverse and our hope is that these writers of color, women writers, that they move within the ranks from staff writer to story editor to executive producer to creators and show-runners. Once they do and they fill that portion of the market, they are gonna do what show-runners do everyday — they hire who they know and who they've been working with and have experience with. Once this happens, the concentration of women and minorities writers get to those positions of power, which are show-runners and creators.