BuzzFeed: The Boys Club

One more take on the state of male/female hiring in animation industry:

Inside The Persistent Boys Club Of Animation

... Women make up only 21% of working [Animation] guild members in 2015, and out of the 584 members working as storyboarders, only 103 are women, according to the Animation Guild. One could point approvingly to animation schools as a harbinger of change — last fall, 71% of students in the California Institute of the Arts’ famed character animation program were female, the Los Angeles Times reported. However, that same school year in its Producers Show, which screens the “best” student work, more than two-thirds of the films shown were by male students, in a year when men made up less than one-third of students in the program. Furthermore, women outnumbered men in the program in 2012, 2013, and 2014 — and yet in each of those years, men still outnumbered women in the Producers Show. ...

Women who have worked in animation for anywhere from a few years to six decades talked to BuzzFeed News about how things have gotten better — and how they haven’t. ...

The Animation Guild supplied Buzz Feed with the ratios of men to women in various parts of the animation business, but were unable to break the industry down egarding race, since we keep no records.

Women have been making slow but steady inroads in various classifications since the early nineties. but there is still a ways to go. The cartoon biz is similar to its live-action cousin: There's an institutional tilt toward males, and it will likely persist for some time. When you have Top Dogs who are more comfortable working with men, men predominate.

As we've noted before, Jeffrey Katzenberg has been one of the few studio heads who has hired women in key creative position for a long stretch of time. Until Disney released Frozen, DreamWorks Animation was the only studio that had women helming animated features.