• Progress is inexorably slow and varies wildly between national film industries. This is surely not much of a surprise to women and gender minorities working in the industry right now. If we just drew a straight line into the future based on the rate of change between 2005 and 2020, men won’t comprise 50% of the key creatives in Germany until some time between 2041–2044; in the UK sometime between 2085–2088; and in Canada basically never with a projected equity period not occurring until 2215–2218
• For the most part the small equity gains that have already occurred did so without displacing men
• Men predominantly collaborate with other men, highlighting a major gender disparity in the way professional networks are formed and perpetuate male dominance.
• Hypothetical modeling of different interventions shows varying success rates across the different industries. And using the “natural experiment” of Germany, which for the most part is the most equitable industry we studied and yet has made very few gender equity policy interventions, it may be that policy itself is not going to be a source of significant solutions anyway. This is a confronting but necessary reflection for many of us who have invested without question in the idea that equity policies are the main avenue to change.

This last finding has several other dimensions – firstly it suggests that there is no one-size- fits-all magic bullet solution. Instead of focusing on “more mentoring!’  or ” bring on quotas!” we need to develop customised policies that are attuned to distinct industry contexts. Secondly – the vast majority of tests we ran made a negligible difference to gender equity and in some cases exacerbated it.

Key Takeaways

We don’t want these somewhat deflating findings to contribute to “data despondency”. There was some good news in amongst the null and negative results. For example, in general, interventions that focus on connecting women and gender minorities to successful men do show some broad potential for accelerating change. And in a tiny subset of the data we could see that accountability-driven policies that tie industry funding and awards to equitable crew composition do seem to be having an effect on reducing the prevalence of all-men teams in the UK and to a lesser extent Canada.

But all in all, we also need to consider one possible conclusion from our research: rather than spend our energy trying to design better or more customised policies we might start by rethinking our aspirations for policy-led solutions altogether. Perhaps, we finally need to concede that gender equity policy has historically worked better as a form of political posturing than as a potent intervention.