EEOC v. Hollywood Studios: Looming Lawsuits? What I Know So Far

On May 12, 2016, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorneys Melissa Goodman and Gillian Thomas broke the news to The Los Angeles Times writer Rebecca Keegan that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) office (headed up by Marla Stern-Knowlton) in San Diego, California, had completed the first stage of its investigation into systemic discrimination against women directors in Hollywood.

That date – May 12, 2016 – was significant because on that day, exactly one year earlier, The New York Times had published the ACLU’s 15-page letter to the EEOC calling for an investigation. This had happened during the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and helped send tremors through entertainment industries around the world.

On October 2, 2015, just five months after the ALCU letter had been published, I received one of the first letters requesting an interview and broke the news to Keegan at The LA Times that the EEOC investigation had officially commenced.

That first stage of the EEOC investigation involved interviewing women directors to seek evidence of the discrimination referred to in the ACLU letter. As many as 100 women directors ultimately provided testimony to the EEOC in intensive interviews over the course of six months.

Convincing Evidence Of Discrimination Against Women Directors

The 2016 ACLU news break was very important because it meant that Stern-Knowlton’s office would prepare memo for the EEOC commissioners in Washington DC. The memo would make a recommendation that a “Commissioner’s Charge” be filed. Filing a such a charge would allow the EEOC Commission in DC to proceed with the investigation to seek probable cause and initiate conciliation.

A Commissioner’s Charge supplants the need for an individual woman director to file a charge and it releases many weapons, like subpeona power and the ability of the Commission to request documents in their efforts to discover evidence of systemic discrimination against women directors in Hollywood.

At some point after that – probably in the six months between June 2016 and November 2016 – the EEOC Commissioners in DC must have served the charge and begun investigating all six major studios. We can only make guesses about the timing of these events because if any EEOC employee violates confidentiality and speaks about the case, they can be fined up to $1,000 and face up to a year in prison.

It’s worth noting that Commissioners Charges are very difficult to get, so the Commission must have found convincing evidence of discrimination against women directors.

Settlement Negotiations

It is now probable that the EEOC has offered the studios the opportunity to settle. This would be termed “settlement negotiations.” If settlement fails in one or all of the studios, the EEOC can file a public “Pattern of Practice” lawsuit in a Federal court. If a lawsuit proceeds against all six studios, the case could make its way to the Supreme Court.

Having had enough evidence to file a “Commissioner’s Charge,” it is very unlikely that the EEOC would simply walk away, so it is very probable that the studios will indeed try to settle. The studios would likely try to coordinate together to come up with a settlement strategy, known as a “Consent Decree,” to attempt to satisfy the EEOC. A “Consent Decree” means a settlement with the government.

There would be quite a lot of pressure on each of the studios to cooperate with each other. For example, one studio refusing to agree to an Affirmative Action settlement plan that the other studios had accepted could present a PR nightmare.

We don’t know how the settlement talks are proceeding because they are kept confidential, but it is likely they are. Such settlements can take up to a year to reach a conclusion. Following the above time-line, that means we can expect news of settlement any time from June 2017 to November 2017.

Director’s Guild of America

As a Director’s Guild of America director member since 1999, and having served as the inaugural DGA Women Directors Category Rep for two years from 2013 to 2015, women directors inform me of news they hear and think may be significant to my work advancing this issue. Because of this, three weeks ago I received a heads up that the EEOC had indeed moved on the six major studios.

This news had trickled down to them during the 2017 DGA-studio Collective Bargaining Negotiations. The negotiations had concluded on December 23, 2016 and the new contract had been ratified on January 25, 2017.

DGA women were taken aback that no resolutions whatsoever for DGA women directors were included in the contract. The next opportunity for negotiations will not come for three more years, in 2020 (incidentally the 100-year anniversary for Women’s Suffrage). I was stunned by that news, so I asked friends in DGA governance to find out why this had happened.

Early this month several DGA women told me that they had heard the news that the EEOC had moved on the studios directly from DGA National Executive Director, Jay Roth (who retired in January after 22 consecutive years as the highest paid union boss in the United States). According to them, during the Collective Bargaining Negotiations, Roth said the studios would not be able to negotiate any proposals for women or ethnic minorities because they had a “gag order” since they were under investigation for discrimination charges.

These women told me that Roth had actually told them that the studios were being sued by the EEOC, but as stated above, if a discrimination lawsuit had been filed, it would be public information. Therefore, it is more probable that the EEOC had filed a “Commissioner’s Charge,” and are actively seeking settlement.

“Women Directors Might Just Get the Hollywood Ending They Have Been Hoping For”

I took this news to David Robb at Deadline Hollywood. On February 15, 2017, he published the news that the studios were in settlement talks with the EEOC over charges of discrimination against women directors.

According to the article, “The EEOC is in settlement talks with the major studios to resolve charges that they systemically discriminated against female directors. ‘Every one of the major studios has received a charge contending that they failed to hire women directors,’ a knowledgeable source told Deadline.”

This is as much as we know. Absolute confirmation of this news can only come from studios heads or studio counsel, but ACLU attorneys Melissa Goodman and Gillian Thomas, wrote on the ACLU website the following:

“EEOC is not permitted by law to comment on pending investigations, so it isn’t possible for us to independently confirm the Deadline piece. But we have no reason to doubt its veracity. And the story is bolstered by another recent article concerning contract negotiations between the major studios and networks and the Directors Guild of America.”

Goodman and Thomas entitled the article optimistically: Women Directors Might Just Get the Hollywood Ending They Have Been Hoping For.

Let’s hope they are right.