Girls on Film: Hollywood's 4 percent problem

This year, a criminally low 4 percent of movies are going to be directed by women. It's time for the industry to fix this.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw
(Image credit: (Fox Searchlight))

You might think women have kicked ass in the film business in recent years. In 2009, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar. On the eve of her 50th birthday, Sandra Bullock found the greatest financial and critical success of her career while shouldering the blockbuster Gravity. Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy have reinvigorated the world of female comediennes (and made Hollywood see them as a potential goldmine).

Unfortunately, those anomalies mask the actual numbers, which are as disheartening as ever.

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Monika Bartyzel

Monika Bartyzel is a freelance writer and creator of Girls on Film, a weekly look at femme-centric film news and concerns, now appearing at TheWeek.com. Her work has been published on sites including The Atlantic, Movies.com, Moviefone, Collider, and the now-defunct Cinematical, where she was a lead writer and assignment editor.