Female director numbers 'reach an all-time high'

Female director numbers reached an all-time high in Hollywood in 2020.

The Celluloid Ceiling, which has tracked employment trends in the film industry for the last 23 years, reports that for the second consecutive year, there are more women directing top-grossing movies than ever before.

Women filmmakers accounted for 16 percent of directors working on the top 100 grossing films in 2020, according to the report, which confirmed a rise from 12 percent in 2019 and just four percent in 2018.

Dr. Martha Lauzen, the executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, told Deadline: "Even without the release of some of this year’s most anticipated big-budget films by women - including Chloe Zhao’s 'Eternals' and Cate Shortland’s 'Black Widow' - the percentage of women working as directors inched upward in 2020.

"The good news is that we’ve now seen two consecutive years of growth for women who direct. This breaks a recent historical pattern in which the numbers trend up one year and down the next. The bad news is that fully 80 percent of top films still do not have a woman at the helm."

The study also found that women accounted for 18 percent of directors on the top 250 films, up from 13 percent in 2019.

Despite the recent progress, Lauzen insisted that more needs to be done in order to resolve the "imbalance" that still exists within the film industry.

She said: "This imbalance is stunning. The majority of films employ fewer than five women and 10 or more men."