Hollywood Is Blowing It With Women

Cate Blanchett got it right at the Oscars. Hollywood is still treating women-centered films as "niche experiences"—and the industry is similarly marginalizing the women who work in it, writes Maureen Dowd in the New York Times. According to a San Diego State University study last year, women made up just "6% of directors, 10% of writers, 15% of executive producers, 17% of editors and 3% of cinematographers," Dowd notes. "Hollywood is disintegrating faster than it is transitioning to modernity."

Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar win doesn't seem to have changed much, and "every time that a female-driven film like Bridesmaids makes boatloads of money at the box office, it is considered a fluke, a one-off," says the professor behind the study, even though 52% of moviegoers are women. Meryl Streep put it simply: "Don't they want to make money?" she asked of Hollywood execs. Those women who do work in the industry, meanwhile, make a "paltry" amount, said Amy Pascal, co-chair of Sony Entertainment. But this year's box office did show a "gigantic change": "Between Gravity, Hunger Games, Frozen, The Heat, and others, that’s $4 billion. You can’t have a year like last year and not see something different," Pascal tells Dowd. Click for her full column. (More Hollywood stories.)