Women in Film: Where are We?

My mother and I went to the movies every Sunday morning for the matinee showing of new releases. My sister and I go to the movies every Christmas night after dinner with relatives. When meeting up with friends, dinner and a movie is a favorite. If I’m staying in with my roommate, we usually watch a movie and eat Nutella from the jar. Films contribute significantly to the cultural discourse that my family, friends, and I are all an active part of. Yet, women are left out of professional conversations.

Despite the hours women in my life and around the world have spent contributing to the world of cinema, there remains a major gender gap in film related careers. Everything - from producing to critiquing to enrolling in introductory classes and college programs - come out as male dominated fields.

Why does this happen? A world that touches so many of women's lives is somehow so inaccessible.

The two film courses I’ve taken at NYU thus far have shown me how deep gender bias runs. I was the only female in my recitation in the fall semester, and often, eyes turned to me when questions of feminism came up. My teacher for a foreign film class didn’t screen a single female producer as we covered several countries and their greatest contributions to the independent film circuit. At the end of the year he addressed this while also pointing out that only three girls had chosen to enroll in his course out of twenty students.

Besides nodding in affirmation at this clear fact, the discussion didn’t go anywhere. Somehow, there is a fundamental aspect to film culture that discourages women from pursuing or even dreaming of careers in the industry. It’s not a matter of discovering why girls are falling off the path to becoming tycoons in cinema; it’s a matter of girls knowing about the path in the first place.

With so little representation of women in film, girls have few role models from which to draw inspiration. The symbolic annihilation of women who succeed in film is starving upcoming generations of smart, capable and interested young women who only need the resources to do something spectacular.

Kara Price is currently an undergraduate at New York University studying Philosophy, Psychology and Creative Writing. In addition to her academics, Kara pursues dance in the city, taking classes and performing with the Pulse Dance Project.