TAG: Right in Mainstream

The end of last week, an officer of Women in Animation as for stats regarding how many women were working in cartoonland. I told her the guild didn't have extensive documentation, but gave her what we'd been able to track here, here and here.

To summarize: Eighteen percent of active, working members of the Animation Guild are women. That figure has been pretty steady for the last several years.

(You can view the breakdown in job categories at the links above.) ...

But our percentages are not very different from other entertainment unions and guilds:

According to the most recent data collected by the Directors Guild of America, this past season, of more than 3,100 episodes in more than 190 scripted series on network and cable, 85 percent were directed by males, and 15 percent were directed by females. These statistics are basically unchanged from the year before, and show just modest improvement from DGA reports issued in years past.

Women make up between 11-12% of animation writers. What about live-action writers?

Between the 1999-00 and 2011-12 seasons, women writers’ share of television staff employment increased about 5 percentage points — from 25 percent to 30.5 percent. ...

While WGA women writers caught a larger share of staff jobs between 2000 and 2012 (admittedly, the stats jumped around a lot), between 2006 and 2012 TAG female writers held the same percentage of jobs -- around 11%. (2006 job breakdowns here.)

Over the years I've written a number of posts about women's participation rates in Animation Guild job classifications: year after low they have been far below those of men. Historically, the only areas where women predominated were in ink-and-paint jobs (which are now mostly gone) and animation and final checking classifications.

But everywhere else, it's clear that female percentages in Cartoonland are right in line with job numbers on the live-action side. Over long stretches of time, men have held the lion's share of DGA and WGA jobs, and at rates similar to those inside animated features and shorts.