Why We Need to Talk About Time's Up in Post-Production

At the beginning of this year, as Time’s Up burst - via the red carpet - onto the front page, I was overwhelmed (though not surprised) by the snapshot presented of women in the film industry.

Whilst born out of a very specific (and urgent) situation – sexual harassment in the feature film industry in Hollywood – the conversation has grown into a movement that is now shining the spotlight on a broader spectrum of issues – pay equity, discrimination, and equal representation - across many industries.

I’m a senior producer at an animation studio. I have a burning passion for what I do and I think that comes from the camaraderie I feel with my team. Working on ambitious projects with tight schedules, getting beers and piling into the online suite to watch the first renders, finally working out how to get that cow to dissolve (and the asking of weird questions such as this) – VFX and animation is a thrilling industry to be a part of and is made up of great people.

Image credit: The Lily

But after the Golden Globes, I looked back at the eight years I have worked both as a freelancer and full-time employee in post production, and I had a very sad realisation: I have never once worked with a full-time employed 3D or Nuke artist who was a woman. Some fantastic female freelancers, yes. But apart from that, in my experience, it’s been 100% male.

100%.

That being said, the vast majority of my colleagues in producing, marketing, accounting and administrative roles, have been women. I've worked under a female head of production. It’s not that there are no women in post-production, it’s that I see a disparity in the kinds of roles these women are doing.

I would love to ask those working in VFX and CGI production reading this piece, to look up from their monitor, around the production floor, and see if this observation rings true for them now, or was true in their past companies.

I would love to see statistics, or the breakdown by gender for each role and department. But right now, these figures aren’t out there - or at least anywhere I can find them - so all I can write from is my own experience and the conversations I’ve had with others in the industry, which lead me to believe there is a disparity in terms of which gender is doing which roles. Or in other words, noticeably fewer female than male VFX and 3D animation artists.

But is this a problem?

I’ve had conversations recently with two (male) 3D artists, who are not just excellent at their jobs, but also amazing humans who I consider friends and whose opinion I trust. They believe that the gender divide is gender determined – that when it comes to VFX and animation, ‘Women just aren’t interested in the more techie jobs’.

Gender parity within more tech-focussed professions is an issue places like tech mecca Silicon Valley have been grappling with for a while, with Google especially taking a lot of flack publicity-wise. This culminated with the leaking of ‘The Anti-Diversity Memo’. The author - a senior engineer - claimed (and I’m paraphrasing here) that when it comes to tech, women are genetically better suited and more inclined to some jobs/tasks, and men to others.

After this memo found its way from the intranet to the internet, he was fired.

Now, if you’ll allow me to stick my neck out a little… Personally, I respectfully, but also vehemently, disagree with the idea that women just aren’t interested, or could not be interested, in the more technical aspects of CGI production. That our biology makes us less inclined to pursue these roles. The lead rigging TD artist at MPC in London is a woman, and even if they are the minority, there are indeed women out there thriving in this field. But I wonder if this perception – that it’s generally not a job for a woman, or that women are less inclined to want to do it based on their biology – could not somehow itself, be part of the problem.

Sociologists look at how stereotypes and unconscious bias shape not just how we see others, but also how we see ourselves and assess our own opportunities. Curious statistics, for example, that 58% of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are 6’2” or taller, even though only 3.9% of the US population are of this height, are attributed to this.

 Image credit: Texas Diversity Magazine

‘If we can see it, we can be it’ goes the catchphrase. And what I see, both on production floors and on panels at industry events, is predominantly men.

A podcast I regularly listen to, recently published an episode discussing a study on the power of stereotypes. It looked at differences in the performance of university students of advanced mathematics, where the results of female students were substantially worse than those of the equally qualified male students. Often put down to genetic differences between the sexes (something the Anti-Diversity Memo asserts), this gap was completely eradicated when a few small changes to the language used in the testing conditions corrected the gender stereotype that women are worse at math. When they thought their gender didn’t matter, the results of the same female students were suddenly on par with their male counterparts. So apart from biology, there is also sociology at play. Both run deep, and both are in all of us. But change is possible.

Thanks for digressing with me to Silicon Valley and social science and let me return you now, to my point…

I know that the 3D and VFX artists I work with would be happy to have more females on board. And I just know that having a greater number of women in these roles would bring more than just new talent. So where the ladies at?

Image credit: Nieman Labs

What we know from Hollywood is this: in the top 100 grossing films from last year, women made up only 2% of cinematographers, 8% of directors and 10% of writers. Wow! What is the percentage of female modelers, riggers, animators, lighting and rendering artists, TDs, and compositors in our industry? How wide is the gender gap here?

The adage goes: to find the solution, you need to understand the problem. In this instance, unfortunately, I think we need to take even one step further back and first obtain a fuller picture of where we’re really at in terms of gender representation in the VFX and animation industry. Get some hard numbers together and, with this research in hand, draw a starting line and move on to the bigger questions.

The answers are complex, and the questions uncomfortable. They can be misconstrued as an accusation or an attack. But they are not. I do think these questions are relevant and I do think they are necessary. But I also think that I need to listen again to the answers of my male colleagues above because, after journeying down my sociology rabbit hole, I can see that in a way, they are also right. For now.

I want to understand why equal gender representation and diversity could be/is a problem for our industry. I want to know where it comes from and how we can overcome it. And what role the choice to have a family might impact this. I want to hear from others working in post and CGI production on how they see this issue. For conversations to be had, stories to be told and ideas to be shared on panels, in lunchrooms, or even a residual, solitary thought of someone biking home. Perhaps, when my current project is delivered, I will have the time to dig deeper, and come back to you with some hard facts. Perhaps there are others out there who want to dig deeper together?

50/50 by 2020 is one of the clearly set goals of the Time’s Up movement. Can this also be integrated into our industry’s pipeline?