Research Context

In 2012, Women in View, a national not-for-profit organization dedicated to strengthening gender representation and diversity in Canadian media, published its first On Screen Report, analyzing the position of writers, directors, and cinematographers in scripted English-language series funded by the Canada Media Fund, and feature films funded by Telefilm Canada. Over the years, the On Screen Reports have held public funders accountable to their gender equity commitments and measured the impact of media diversity initiatives.

In the fifth edition (2019), Women in View’s On Screen Report quantified the impact of race on women’s opportunities in screen-based media. 

The findings in this report are sobering. Women’s share of writing, directing and cinematography work in both film and TV remains below 25%. Women of colour are not experiencing the same gains as other women. Worse still, over the course of the study, Indigenous women’s participation dropped from insignificant to negligible, a very troubling result. 

The researchers also found that the race of women in key creative roles impacts the diversity of cast and crew overall:

When women take on the creative leadership role of showrunner there is a trickle down effect and more women are hired in all key creative roles. When the showrunners are women of colour and Indigenous women there is an added bonus; along with gender balance, there is increased diversity among the writers, directors and cinematographers.

...When the showrunning team included a woman of colour or an Indigenous woman, not only was there gender balance with 52% of contracts going to women, there was also far greater diversity with 8% of those contracts going to women of colour and 22% to Indigenous women.

The analysis of showrunners shows that a better strategy is to start at the top with women in creative leadership positions. When women lead, more women work. When women of colour lead more women of colour work. When Indigenous women lead, more Indigenous women work. 

The “Showrunner Effect” was also true for producers in development and production (Women in View, On Screen Report 2019). “Women of colour producers had a greater percentage of women of colour on their teams than other producers and Indigenous women producers worked with greater numbers of Indigenous women.”

As Women In View acknowledges in their 2021 report (which was completed with oversight by Nathalie Younglai, founder of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour in TV and Film (BIPOC TV & Film), “These intersectional insights reveal a disturbing pattern common across gender-parity initiatives: setting targets merely based on gender doesn’t equitably serve all women.” Research about gender equity in film has historically highlighted increased opportunities for women, but the 2019 and 2021 On Screen Reports show that it is largely white women who have been beneficiaries of public commitments to gender equity. 

Initiatives to increase the number of women working in TV and film did not have a significant impact on diversity. Of the 43% of women in key creative TV roles in 2019, only 6.44% were Black women & Women of Colour and 0.94% were Indigenous women. The same disparity exists in every measured category.

Consequently, the ongoing challenges and barriers faced by women of colour and Indigenous women in the industry have been largely rendered invisible — until now. Women in View and BIPOC TV & FIlm’s vital information gathering and analysis makes the barriers we have witnessed and experienced as BIWOC in Canada’s film and television industry undeniable. 

In this landscape, we saw an opportunity to amplify the experiences of women marginalized by the industry’s status quo in their own words. What if BIWOC had a chance to speak to their realities, strengths, fears, and doubts? How might that change our approaches in meeting diversity and inclusion targets? What other strategies could we employ?

We also wanted to make space to document these lived experiences with a finer grain, to show how intersections such as race, ethnicity, appearance, education level, socio-economic status, language, and sexuality can affect a person’s opportunities in the industry. For instance, a newcomer filmmaker from China would have vastly different experiences from an Indo-Canadian filmmaker born in Williams Lake. However, both are “women of colour.”

This research is intended to complement the research on gender parity and diversity in the Canadian screen-based production industry by Telefilm Canada, the Canadian Media Producers Association, the Canada Media Fund, the National Film Board, and Women in View.

In addition to those reports, we are indebted to the contributors and authors of the following publications, which have notably influenced this project: