Research Confirms That Women in Top Film Jobs Dramatically Increase Female Hires Across the Board

If you want a bunch of women working on a film, start with with female producers and directors.

The Hollywood Reporter got a look a new report from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, based out of San Diego State University. According to their research, you’re much more likely to see female crew members on a movie where women hold the top jobs. For instance, on movies directed by men, 8 percent of writers were women; on movies directed by women, the percentage leapt to more than half. Female producers are similarly influential:

The study looked at 700 films released in 2014, excluding foreign films, and found that on productions where at least one-third of the producers and executive producers were women the number of female directors, writers, editors and cinematographers that were hired more than doubled.

Almost 85 percent of the productions studied had no female directors, 80 percent had no female writers and 92 percent had no female cinematographers. Films with one-third female producers had female directors 20 percent of the time.

Emphasis mine. IndieWire pulled out some analysis from study author and center director Dr. Martha M. Lauzen: “[H]iring decisions for these roles,” she wrote “may be most susceptible to mainstream film industry biases and expectations about what directors and cinematographers should look like demographically.”

Of course, this will only help if Hollywood actually wants more women working on movies. Which…