“The Worst Year in a Decade for Female Writers and Showrunners.”

Here's an interesting conversation piece:

Women Can’t Create and White Men Can’t Jump

Neely Swanson

I received several emails this past week pointing out the scarcity of women writers on the recent pilot pickups. At a cursory glance it is easy to jump on the bandwagon decrying the lack of diversity among the “creator” ranks, not to mention showrunners and writing staffs, but this was a subject worth pursuing in a bit more depth. Nikki Finke sent a missile to the broadside of various network heads about what was being called “the worst year in a decade for female writers and showrunners.”

Based on announced pilot pickups and using The Studio System and the Trades, I made a list of all the new pilots that had been ordered to production as of February 1 for the four major broadcast networks, as well as the credited writers, the production studio and the intended network. Of the 66 pilots I documented, 13 pilots had at least one female writer as part of the “created by” team; however, of those 66 pilots, only 7 of them were written entirely by women. You can do the math yourself, but this works out to a high of 20% involvement by women when writing alone and/or with men; and just 11% when written by women without male participation. A closer look at the all the names will reveal one writer of Hispanic origin, three Asian-Americans and an entire absence of African American writers. More...