How The DGA Used New By-Laws To Silence Women Directors

By Maria Giese

The Director’s Guild of America needs to adopt a distinct mandate in all diversity hiring efforts and negotiations with studios and signatories establishing women DGA members as a separate group from minority males.

Thirty-five years ago, six women directors (Susan Bay, Nell Cox, Joelle Dobrow, Dolores Ferraro. Victoria Hochberg, and Lynne Littman) courageously did so.  They took a stand for all women directors that resulted in immense success.

Starting 1979, they founded the DGA Women’s Steering Committee, initiated a DGA-led class action lawsuit against the studios, and sparked the Guild’s diversity program for all women and ethnic minority male Guild members.  In the ensuing ten years, from 1985 to 1995, their actions resulted in a skyrocketing of female director employment from .05% to 16%.

Yet here we are 20 year later– and the percentage of female director employment has sunk into stasis and decline.

This is unacceptable.

In contrast, thanks to the DGA diversity program that emerged out of the work of the “Original Six,” minority males have seen remarkable positive change in their employment numbers in the past two decades.  Just since 2004, when Paris Barclay and Michael Apted created the “DGA Diversity Task Force,” minority male TV director employment has shot from single-digit lows to 17% in 2014.

Consider this:

According to the current US Census Bureau stats, minority males make up 17.9% of the US population, and today they direct upwards of 17% of episodic TV shows. Minority males have arrived. Their numbers, in terms of ratio, are no longer disparate from their population in our country.

Women of all ethnicities, however, have been left behind.  Women make up 51% of the US population, are not a “minority,” and yet direct just 14% of TV (only 2% of those jobs go to women of color), and they helm less than 5% of studio features. Women director numbers are staggeringly disparate, in terms of ratio, from their population in our country.

This disparity in employment advancements between women and male minorities is due to the fact that women get buried under the general category of “Diversity.”  Studios and signatories can fulfill diversity agreement obligations simply by hiring male ethnic minorities, and without hiring females at all.

In an effort to create a more fair system for women DGA members and to bring our industry into lawful compliance with the US Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title 7, ensuring equal employment opportunity, the Directors Guild of America needs to create a separate mandate for women.

The DGA National Board must vote to break women Guild members out as a distinct category in all DGA-studio and Guild signatory diversity agreements (such as Article 15 of the Basic Agreement and Article 19 of the FLTTA) as was originally done 35 years ago, before getting derailed through the flawed program of clumping minority men in with women.

Doing this would put the Directors Guild of America at the very forefront of dramatic positive change toward creating gender equity among women directors and their teams in our industry.

Doing this would mean the Directors Guild of American is taking a leadership role in fair gender employment opportunity in the United States, in compliance with the laws of our nation.

Doing this would distinguish the DGA as an organization far ahead of the curve in acknowledging the global relevance of balanced gender perspective in the media we export around the world— feature films and television that help make up the cultural voice of our whole civilization.

Now is the time to act to take this essential, long overdue step toward solving current rampant discrimination against women directors and their teams in U.S. media.

Five reasons women require their own distinct category:

1. Women and minorities are separated by the Guild in terms of statistics, but they are not separated in terms of hiring requirements by Guild signatories.  Studios can fulfill diversity hiring requirements by hiring minority men only, and hiring no women at all— which happens all the time.
2. Placing the two terms (“women” and “minorities”) together is both confusing and deceptive because the term “women” represents women of all ethnicities which is a majority population, while the other contains a minority group of people of both genders.
3. The term “ethnic minority” is a deceptive term because differentiating minorities from Caucasians is complex and imprecise.  It is a simple matter to categorize oneself as an ethnic minority just by saying you are one.  This exacerbates the difficulty of seeking solutions to employment discrimination that women face, especially women of color.
4. Women of all ethnicities face very different and distinct challenges from those of ethnic minority men. Women’s issues require treatment and solutions that differ from those of men.
5. “Women of all ethnicities” are not a minority, they are a numerical majority and ought to be seeking employment parity with men of all ethnicities.  This goal is a statistical impossibility if they are combined with men in diversity programs.

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Originally Posted on March 25, 2015