Yahoo News Women have written just 28% of TV shows since 2001
Women have written just 28% of scripted UK television shows over the past 15 years, a report has found.
This week, the Writers' Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) published 'Gender Inequality and Screenwriters: A study of the impact of gender on equality of opportunity for screenwriters and key creatives in the UK film and television industries'.
Written by Alexis Kreger and Stephen Follows, the report found television series written by women remained at a "shockingly low level" between 2001 and 2016.
The report also found women "are being discriminated against in terms of the writing projects to which they are gaining access", with women in TV "being pigeonholed by genre" – and ultimately concluded by urging public service broadcasters to adopt a 50/50 gender split to level the playing field.
Indeed, amongst the most troubling findings from the WGGB report was that of all scripted programming on the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 between 2001 and 2016, only 18% of it was predominantly written by women.
[Happy Valley, written by Sally Wainwright]
One portion of the report examined 7,469 writers with at least one credit on British TV in that 15-year period, finding that 30% (approximately 2,241) were female.
Of scripted UK TV episodes during this period, only 28% were predominantly female-written. When soaps and continuing drama series were removed, that number dropped to only 14%.
According to the report, female writers were particularly under-represented in genres including comedy (11%) and light entertainment (9%).
It also found that, while the number of female writers working on television shows steadily rose during the 15-year period, evenly gender split writing teams actually fell from 11% to 5% over that same period.
The report also found that 42% of female TV writers felt discrimination had a negative impact on their career progression, and two-thirds said they believed that gender had an impact on hiring and commissioning decisions.
[Three Girls written by Nicole Taylor]
The report authors noted that female writing staff securing fewer primetime breaks than their male peers creates "a powerful self-perpetuating system" of "unconscious bias".
To gather its data, the WGGB drew on TV credit data from the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society.
It's launched a campaign called Equality Writes to accompany the report, with support from writers including Sandi Toksvig, Lucy Kirkwood, Kay Mellor, JoJo Moyes, Gaby Chiappe and Katherine Ryan.
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