Photograph: Patrick Redmond/ITV/PA
A leading TV executive has called on the industry to confront the “unconscious bias” that prevents women from entering the sector.
Jane Featherstone, the executive producer of Broadchurch and Life on Mars, said it was time to tackle the factors that sometimes pigeonhole female writers in TV.
She pointed to the disparities highlighted in a recent Writers’ Guild report, which reveals that 28% of TV episodes are written predominantly by women. This figure drops to 14% for primetime TV.
The report inspired the Radio Times to launch a campaign to promote female writers. Featherstone, who is leading the project, said: “Television drama helps us to make sense of the world we live in. It follows that, in order to understand as much of the world around us as we can, we must hear from writers from all walks of life, irrespective of their gender, ethnicity, disability or background. But we don’t.”
The Writers’ Guild report gathered data for more than 10 years to examine systemic gender inequality in television. Featherstone said the results were stark and industry needed to hire more women in order to change the status quo. “Men hire more men. It’s not just me saying that (although I am), it’s also a fact, as the report notes. But women hire more women,” she said.
“Now more than ever, we need to strive to get more women into positions of power, hiring, commissioning, producing. It’s our collective responsibility to challenge ourselves and counter this unconscious bias.|”
She urged industry leaders to question the assumption that men were better at writing about gang warfare and women about relationships. Featherstone said: “Do we really privately wonder if a dark thriller is meatier coming from a man, or whether a woman is truly able to get under the skin of a big political thriller?”
The Radio Times campaign, Women’s Words, will examine how to create meaningful change by speaking to burgeoning female screenwriters and senior industry figures.
Leading female TV writers including Sharon Horgan (Catastrophe, Divorce), Daisy May Cooper (This Country) and Lisa McGee (Derry Girls) have lent their support to the campaign.
Tim Glanfield, the editor of RadioTimes.com, said: “There are some fantastic female voices working in drama and comedy, making some of the most memorable programmes of recent years. However, the Writers’ Guild statistics are stark and we feel, as Britain’s biggest television website, it is right for us to shine a spotlight on the issue and raise the profile of the next generation of female writers.”
