From Deepika Padukone to Alia Bhatt - Bollywood has its dames not dimmed out by its dashing males - but behind the Great Indian Silver Screen, the business still sees a dismal number of women at the helm.
In fact, the share of women in high ranks in film businesses and creativity has reduced by 1 percentage point in the last year, shows a report by Ormax Media, Amazon Prime Video and Film Companion Studios. In 2022, there were 13 percent women as commissioning in-charge, and this went down to 12 percent last year.
As many as 144 director and CXO positions across 25 top media and entertainment companies were analysed to understand how deep ran the gender disparity in the Indian entertainment industry.
A louder presence of the more underrepresented voices will certainly bring in a difference in the content Indian audiences are offered. Gender equality at the top ensures a good marker for the amount of opportunities the industry provides to those whose stories and voices need to be heard for a change to take place in the entire industry. When real change begins at the top, the trickle-down effect becomes more evident and impactful down the ladder.
"Despite the growing presence of female-led narratives, gender divide persists in key creative roles. Women remain underrepresented as directors, screenwriters, and producers, limiting the richness of storytelling by narrowing the balanced perspectives," said Stuti Ramachandra, director and head of production for international originals at Prime Video, India.
Women in-charge
When it comes to women in charge of projects, including movies or series, the growth was minimal in 2023 to 15 percent from 12 percent in 2022.
While production design, direction, writing, and cinematography see barely any growth in head-of-the-department (HOD) representation, editing has a different tale to tell. Female representation by HOD positions in editing grew to 18 percent in 2023 from 10 percent a year back. The significant increase was caused by a surge of female writers and editors in streaming content in 2023, the report noted.
Other wings like direction and production design saw a marginal increase of 1 percent for female representation by HOD positions. While the writing department reported a 3 percent increase in the number of women at HOD positions, cinematography saw a 2 percent uptick.
Women as head of departments increased across formats, including theatrical movies and streaming content, but the gap between theatrical and streaming properties continues.
Streaming is leading the way with female HOD representation at 20 percent last year as against 17 percent in 2022, while for theatrical films, female HOD representation stood at 6 percent in 2023 from 3 percent in 2022. Streaming films reported an increase last year in women representation as HODs to 22 percent from 17 percent in 2022.
A lot of the improvement was seen in Hindi and other language properties like Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, and Bengali. Kannada and Telugu, however, fared worse than before. This has brought down the performance of the southern language properties even as there was a slight uptick in Malayalam, while Tamil numbers remained unchanged.
Female HOD representation for Hindi language projects grew to 21 percent in 2023 from 17 percent in 2022, while other language was up to 15 percent from 10 percent.
On the other hand, female HOD representation for Kannada language projects fell to zero from 4 percent in 2022 and for Telugu language projects it fell to 3 percent from 7 percent in 2022. Malayalam language projects saw female HOD representation increase to 6 percent from 4 percent and in Tamil, it remained unchanged at 6 percent.
Another observation is a slight increase in women being appointed as HODs when a female is commissioning in-charge for series or movie projects.
Under a male commissioning in-charge, the representation of women HOD increased to 8 percent last year from 7 percent in 2022. On the flip side, it increased to 24 percent from 22 percent when a female was commissioning in-charge.
Another bright side is that the share of female commissioning in-charge increased to 42 percent last year from 31 percent in 2022.
Silver lining
There's a silver lining when it comes to females on the silver screen.
A total of 169 properties were evaluated on the Bechdel Test. To pass the test, a film must have at least one scene where two named female characters are talking to each other about something other than a man or men. Given their longer run time, the criterion for streaming series was modified to at least three scenes.
Female characters last year had more fulfilling arcs where their interest, opinions, and issues were part of the storyline as on the Bechdel Test the properties evaluated showed an increase to 52 percent last year from 47 percent in 2022.
The increase is largely because of theatrical and streaming films where female characters seem to be faring better as compared to those in streaming series.
Trailer talktime
Another area where women representation seemed to have increased was trailers. From the main trailer of each property, the length of the spoken parts by male and female characters were identified and measured and the result is the percentage of talktime allotted to female characters (including transgender characters) in these trailers.
Female voices occupied 29 percent in trailers across 169 properties, making a 2 percentage point increase from last year. Each format has seen a nominal growth. Even in streaming trailers, which are performing better than theatrical trailers, just about a third of the total speaking time is allotted to female characters.
Projects that had 55 percent of female trailer talktime include Sara Ali Khan's Gaslight, Dimple Kapadia-starrer Saas Bahu Aur Flamingo, Made In Heaven S2, Lust Stories 2, The Kerala Story, Aarya S3, Jaane Jaan, and Baipan Bhari Deva.
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