Researchers Elizabeth Prommer, Deb Verhoeven and Skadi Loist won Top Media Industries Paper at the 2022 International Communication Association Conference for their paper “Creative Teams and Gender Inequality in the Screen Industry-A Social Network Approach.”

This work applied Social Network Analysis to a dataset of German Film Producers, Directors and Writers from 2009 to 2016 and used statistical, biographical and network analysis to reveal the gendered and closed nature of the most influential networks that operate within the industry. Adding to a growing body of work using Social Network Analysis to understand the media industries, this paper also identifies how inequality is expressed in uneven relationships between people rather than relying solely on aggregated statistics (“headcounts”) that describe the total number of different kinds of people.