DGA Diversity Lists: The Killing Chokehold On Women Directors

Originally Posted on March 6, 2015 on Maria Giese’s groundbreaking blog “Women Directors: Navigating the Boys’ Club

In 1976 the California Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights determined that women were literally excluded as creators and directors of media content in the United States of America.  The Commission stated that the primary block to female director employment is that the U.S. Film and TV industry uses Lists to hire employees, and this makes it very difficult to enforce equal opportunity employment.

Over 30 years later—in 2014—the ACLU is calling attention to the continuing rampant discrimination faced by female directors stating that “Gender disparities in film and TV directing are striking and have not improved over the last 30 years.” DGA, studio, and agency Directors Lists stand at the heart of the problem.

Today, one of the key systems the DGA and studios rely upon attempt to mitigate gender discrimination and increase female hires is Lists.  A system not dissimilar from those the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights blamed for equal employment opportunity inaction in 1976.  The keeping of Lists of eligible women by the DGA may be central to Hollywood’s chronic failure to comply with Title VII.

It is stated on the official DGA website www.dga.org:  “The DGA maintains a contact list of experienced women and minority directors to make it easier for producers making hiring decisions. The list can be obtained by any production company by contacting the DGA.”

Who are the women directors on these Lists?  Who in the Guild is responsible for choosing which women appear on which lists?  What is the criterion for inclusion on the Lists?  How do the DGA Lists keep from illegally advantaging some women Guild members over others?  And, most important of all, are the LISTS to blame for the fact that female director employment has remained static for decades?

There are over 1,200 women DGA members in the Director category, yet approximately 1,000 of them (or over 83%) have been chronically unemployed for at least the past five years.  The number of employed women has never exceeded 16% of the overall TV directing workforce, and today comprises about 14%— a 2% drop since 1996, 18 years ago.

In 2004, former DGA president Michael Apted established the DGA Diversity Task Force with current DGA president Paris Barclay. It is a committee comprised mostly of DGA women and ethnic minority director members. Committee members are chosen by the Guild’s president to interface with studio execs and episodic TV producers and show-runners to help facilitate studio compliance with DGA-studio diversity agreements.

One must naturally question just how much of a conflict of interest exists when episodic TV directors of diversity are charged with negotiating diversity hires at the very studios at which they are actively seeking open directing assignments.  Whatever the case, in the ten years the “Force” has been active, the percentage of female director employment in episodic TV has declined.

Chairs of the DGA Diversity Task Force must work closely with the DGA Diversity department. Barclay has been leading the Task Force since 2004, a time during which female director employment has declined, and ethnic minority male director employment has steadily climbed to its current all time high of 17%.

Lesli Linka Glatter joined Barclay as co-chair from 2010 to 2013, and returned again more recently.  According to the May 2015 DGA Annual Member’s Meeting, Barclay has appointed new co-chairs to the “Force”: Todd Holland and Bethany Rooney.

Rooney is one of our industry’s most highly-employed women TV directors, yet she has staunchly opposed political action in the DGA Women’s Steering Committee since she was asked by the Guild leadership become active in the committee last year.  Rooney was also elected last year to co-chair the WSC along with Millicent Shelton and Liz Ryan.

Therefore, the pool of women directors whose names appear on DGA TV Directors Lists is influenced by DGA directors who are already in the pool themselves (another conflict of interest).  The DGA diversity department is responsible for creating and submitting the Lists upon request to producers and show runners who want to hire more women, but according to Diversity staffers, these lists are “individualized” for each submission.

When DGA Diversity is asked for a List of eligible diversity directors from a producer or show-runner, it’s individual to each case (meaning the names on each list are hand-picked, subject to partiality and favoritism).  One diversity administrator told me that “usually those who request a List have specific stipulations, so the Guild diversity takes their master List of ‘eligible directors’ and then produces an individual List according to the stipulations set forth by the person who made the request.”

Former DGA head of diversity, Regina Render, told the DGA Women’s Steering Committee in 2013 that for directors to appear on the List, they must have worked within the past 18 months. Therefore, the default setting for selecting individual directors for the Lists is how recently one has worked, excluding the vast majority of women directors who are chronically underemployed even if they have impressive resumes.

For example, a diversity administrator told me that in recent months one company requested a List of African American directors, so DGA Diversity sent them a list of African American director members who had worked in the past 18 months.  They called back and said they wanted more names, so Diversity sent them African American members who had directed in the past 3 to 5 years.  Still they requested even more names, so again they were sent all the African American members who had directed in the past 10 years.

Unfortunately, no matter how well-intended the Guild Diversity staffers may be, they are working with a system that is fundamentally broken.  The List keeps women who have not worked recently shut out, and that results in producing a small, static pool of diversity director members that advantages a few and prohibits expansion of the pool itself.

It’s important to note that Lists can be illegal— a union may not disseminate Lists if they benefit some members and disadvantage others.  The DGA Lists do exactly that.  Due in large part to these Lists, just 27 individual women (that’s 2.25% of women out of 1,200 eligible female DGA members) directed 45% of all TV episodes that hired women in the past 5 years.  That means 1,173 women were not allowed to compete fairly for these jobs.

Overall, just 4% of DGA women directed 81% of all TV episodes helmed by women from 2009 to July 2014.  And if you’re on the List, you are likely to stay on the List.  If you are not on the List, you are all but shut-out of TV directing.  The List is not merit-based.  In fact, it is demonstrable that the women who appear on the lists are no more talented, gifted, or even accomplished than many of the other 1,200 women DGA directors.

These are lucrative jobs, and perhaps a single hire can result in a woman director qualifying for the best health and pension plans the industry has to offer, plans that can cover her whole family.  The Guild claims that it is not involved in getting its members jobs, but in fact the DGA Lists are proof that it is fully integral to the decisions about who among women directors works and who does not.

The system is patently unfair, and arguably illegal, yet no one seems to know how else to deal with the problem of rampant Title VII violations in Hollywood— America’s liberal entertainment industry has the worst record of discrimination against women of any industry in the United States, including the military and coal mining.

The way studios deal with this problem is by having the DGA deal with it– and the member-run Directors Guild may be relying on a flawed system the allows for individual self-advancement by those in power.  In any case, the Lists present a glaring situation of conflict-of-interest by those in leadership positions to which the DGA National Board appears to turn a blind eye.

Do DGA Lists result in producing a small, static pool of unfairly advantaged women directors and effectively keep others shut out?  Are the Lists in part responsible for the decades-long stasis of female episodic TV directing employment?  If so, the DGA Lists are the killing chokehold that perpetuates the chronic exclusion of women the directing profession.

Exclusionary Lists feed into Title VII violations against women directors in Hollywood making the entertainment industry number one in gender employment inequity in the United States.