GENDER AND THE FORUM: A NEW PERSPECTIVE

We’ve had a couple debates recently, mostly healthy, about gender in the world of film composing. During the last one, in which Richard Kraft asked why more women had not signed up for the composing challenge, I posited that perhaps the percentage of female composers signing up was similar to that of the males, and that the raw numbers of women in the forum were low. That led me to take on a study seeing the actual gender percentages for the forum in general.

A few notes before I get on to the results (you can skip to the results below if you don’t care). I went through about 4900 names (this does not include members who joined after I pulled initial data about a week and a half ago, and also doesn’t include members who since left). If there was any question as to which gender the person in question identified as, I used their Facebook identification as the final word. If their Facebook ID had no gender, I did some research on google, and if that was still inconclusive, I left them out. I’m confident my results are accurate, but obviously, as one person going through that many names, I might have made a couple of errors throughout, so there’s likely a small margin of error.

In addition, remember that this simply is a gender breakdown for the forum as whole. This does not take into account profession, so it is not a representation of the number of male and female COMPOSERS on this forum (I’ll get to that later).

RESULTS: The forum is 80.23 % male and 19.78 % female. In raw numbers, of those I was able to identify, that’s 3930 male, 968 female. Despite being almost 5000 strong, there are under 1000 women. Interestingly, this percentage is about in keeping with a study from earlier this year, which found that women comprised 19 % of Hollywood positions in top 500 movies (it goes down to 17 % for top 250 movies). (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/…/women-filmmakers-2016-st…).

 

STRAY OBSERVATIONS:

– Since I know many here are generally interested in COMPOSER gender, I did keep track of the number of people who SELF-IDENTIFIED as “Composer” on Facebook. This is obviously imperfect, as plenty of people don’t identify as composer who are, but it at least gives a decent insight into the situation. Those numbers:

956 TOTAL
111 FEMALE (11.61 %)
845 MALE (88.39 %)

That’s clearly a lot worse than the numbers in general, and reflects the numbers regarding the film scoring industry specifically, namely that only 2 % (!) of film composers on top 500 movies were women the last few years.

– Richard Kraft had mentioned he was disappointed that, in one of the composing challenges, 31 composers participated, while only one was a women. Generally, that means that 3 % of total identified composers on the forum participated in the challenge. If we were to apply that evenly for men and women, that would mean on a typical challenge, 25 men would participate, and 3 women would, which, sadly, is not so dissimilar from the numbers Mr. Kraft was justifiably upset about.

– While I unfortunately could not get a clear idea of who was added by whom, since Facebook lumps together people who were invited to the forum by others and people who were simply approved by mods (thanks Miriam Mayer for letting me know!), I did notice two things: when people were invited, men were invited generally by both men and women, while women were generally invited by other women. This is also in keeping with studies done around Hollywood, where films with female decision-makers/gatekeepers generally hire a more equal distribution of men and women than other films (http://time.com/4087813/female-directors-study/)

I have plenty more thoughts, but figure this post is long enough. If you have any questions, please ask in the comments, and I’ll be happy to answer! I’m hoping this sparks a productive discussion.