The film festival sector and its networked structures of gender inequality

Abstract

The global film industry is shaped by gender inequality. Women are structurally underrepresented in professional roles that include high levels of creative and economic decision-making power, such as directors, writers, and producers. In our study, we ask to what extent the film festival sector, a prestigious sub-field of the film industry, is structured by gender biases. To address this question, we conceptualize the festival sector as a one-mode network consisting of film festivals that are connected through screening the same film, and as a two-mode network consisting of films and festivals. The composition of film core creative teams (incl. directors, writers, and producers) varies by gender. While some films are made by mixed gender core creative teams, others are made by women-only or men-only core creative teams. We use data on 1323 films that circulate among 1523 festivals and apply network analysis to describe and disentangle the structural facets that underlie persistent gender inequality in the film festival sector. In the first step, we analyze to what extent the one-mode film festival network is connected through the circulation of films with varying gender compositions, and what festivals occupy broker positions in this network. In the second step, we analyze to what extent films of different gender compositions are equally distributed across the overall festival landscape. For the first step, we find that the festival network connected through films by women-only core creative teams is much sparser in comparison to the network connected through films by men-only core creative teams. We also find that the majority of festivals obtaining important broker positions in the network, has not signed the 5050 × 2020 Gender Parity Pledge, which has important policy implications. For the second step, we find that films by men-only core creative teams are on average screened at more festivals as compared to films by women-only core creative teams, and that the degree of distribution of films by men-only core creative teams is much more skewed indicating a more pronounced festival hit dynamic.