The latest data from San Diego State University proves what many feared: women are creating fewer shows, directing fewer programs, and vanishing from our screens after forty. Here are the numbers, and why they matter.
According to the latest "Boxed In" study from San Diego State University's Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, authored by Dr. Martha Lauzen, it is now proven in cold, undeniable numbers that women are creating fewer television shows than they were back in 2017. In an era when women's stories feel like they matter more than ever before, when some of the biggest names in the industry are standing on festival stages and speaking openly about the ways women are pushed aside, these numbers force us to sit with an uncomfortable question about where we are actually heading, and what exactly we are leaving behind for the next generation of women who dream of telling their own stories.
The headline figure alone is enough to make you pause. In the span of a single year, the percentage of women creating streaming series collapsed from thirty-six percent down to twenty-four percent, and the percentage of women directing those same programs fell almost as steeply, tumbling from thirty-two percent to twenty-two percent. Both of those numbers now sit lower than they did nearly a decade ago, which means the small gains we celebrated last year were never the beginning of real progress at all, but rather a brief and fragile moment that the industry allowed to slip right back through its fingers.
Yet the number that truly stays with you, the one that lingers long after you have closed the report, lives on the screen itself. The share of major female characters on streaming television has quietly slipped from 49% down to 44% this year, and on broadcast it hovers at 46%. For roughly a decade, it seemed as though the industry had finally understood something that audiences have been asking for: that women's stories were rich and worth telling and worth watching, and yet somewhere in the last few years that understanding began to quietly unravel, and women are once again being written out of the very roles that hold a story together.
Nowhere is this more painful to watch than in the way women are made to vanish the moment they turn forty. The study lays it out plainly, showing that major female characters make up 44% of the roles written for women in their thirties, and then fall off a cliff to a mere 17% once those women reach their forties. For men, that same decade of life barely registers as a change at all, holding steady at 31% and thirty-one percent, as though aging were a privilege afforded to one gender and denied to the other. There are, in fact, twice as many major male characters over the age of sixty as there are women, which tells you everything about whose later years the industry still considers worth putting on screen.
We have all absorbed the quiet message that society has been sending for generations, the one that whispers that a woman is valuable and desirable and castable right up until she turns thirty, and that once she crosses into her forties she has somehow aged out of the story, while a man of the very same age is called seasoned and distinguished and handed the most fascinating role of his career. It is the same cruel logic that has pushed so many women toward the surgeon's office and the endless carousel of filters and modifications, all in the desperate hope of staying young enough to remain worth casting. But this was never a story about the choices of individual women. This is a story about an entire industry that decided that a woman's life stops being interesting at the exact moment it often becomes the most interesting of all.
This quiet erasure is not confined to television, either, because it is unfolding in real time on the most prestigious stages in all of cinema. At this very moment, at the Venice Film Festival, only a single film out of the twenty competing for the Golden Lion was directed by a woman, and out of competition the picture grows even bleaker, with just nine of forty-seven titles directed by women and every last one of them a documentary. Telluride, opening the very same week, managed to tell a slightly kinder story with noticeably more women working behind the camera, but the excuse the industry keeps reaching for remains stubbornly the same: that there simply is not enough money to fund films made by women. And in that excuse lies the real heart of the problem, because the gatekeeping happens long before a camera ever rolls, in the rooms where financing is decided and greenlights are handed out by a remarkably narrow group of people.
The gap grows even more troubling when you look closely at which women are still being allowed into the frame at all. Among the major female characters on broadcast television, 66% are white, a figure that actually climbed higher this year rather than falling, while the representation of Black women declined, Latina characters dropped to a slim 5%, and Asian women and other women of color remain a small sliver of the whole. What this reveals is genuinely alarming, because as women are pushed further and further out of the picture, the women who manage to remain are becoming less diverse rather than more, and that is a loss that should trouble every single one of us, no matter who we are.
And yet, buried within all of this discouraging arithmetic, there is one number that offers something like hope, and it happens to be the most important figure in the entire study. On the shows that employ at least one woman as a creator, women go on to make up 48% of the writers, while on the shows created entirely by men, that number shrinks to a meager 17%, and the very same pattern repeats itself among directors and editors. The lesson could not be clearer or more encouraging, because it turns out that when women are given a seat at the table, they reach back and pull other women up to sit beside them.
The solution, then, was never about lowering some imaginary standard or handing anyone a favor they did not earn. It has always been about access, about opening the doors at every single level of this industry to women, to people of color, to people who come from different backgrounds and carry different stories in their bones, so that the enormous power of deciding whose lives are worth watching no longer rests in the hands of the same narrow few. Because the truth is that this industry has always adored putting women on display, has always been happy to let us dazzle on the red carpet and sell the tickets and fill the frame, and yet it has remained so deeply reluctant to hand us the pen, the camera, and the final say. These numbers are the proof of that reluctance written plainly in black and white, and the next generation of women, the ones watching all of this unfold right now, are keeping careful score.
Daria Ershova
