WGA Hirings

From time to time we run employment breakdowns in the cartoon biz; how many women, how many olds, how many youngs. The WGA has put out its latest report on their hiring situations:

... [W]hile women have seen a 5% increase in writing staff jobs between 1999-2000 and 2011-2012, at the current rate of growth it would take women “42 years to catch up with men” in terms of TV writing staff jobs.

Minority writers nearly doubled their share of staff writing positions during that same period, from 7.5% to 15.6%, but still remain severely underrepresented compared to the population at large. Among the ranks of TV executive producer in the 2011-2012 season, women were underrepresented by factor of more than 2 to 1 “among writers who run TV shows” and minorities were underrepresented by a factor of nearly 5 to 1.

In the 2010-2011 season, just 9% of pilots had “at least one minority writer attached” and 24% of pilots had at least one woman writer attached. ...

Animation has never had a large cross-section of minorities in its ranks. And the Writers Guild might have fewer women writers than men, but it could be worse. Here's what's happening in cartoonland:

Women in Animation (2009)

directors - 15%

layout - 17.8%

model designers - 15.4%

storyboard - 13.3%

visual development - 9.4%

Everything's relative.

(The L.A. Times take on the report is here.)