Study finds female screenwriters drive profits while male directors get biggest budgets
A new study published in Frontiers in Communication analyzed movie data from 1994 to 2023 to compare profits and budgets based on the gender of writers and directors.
Female writers boost studio earnings
Films written by women generated higher median profits than those with only male writers, according to researcher Anja Huwiler. This financial advantage appeared even when production budgets remained similar across the two groups. The study noted that movies co-directed or co-written by women included titles like Avatar and Jurassic World.
Top budgets favor men
Despite the profit boost from female writers, the highest production budgets went almost exclusively to male-only productions. Researchers found that 39 of the 44 films in the top one percent of spending had no woman director. None of these high-budget projects involved a female director in any capacity.
Slow progress over decades
The share of movies crediting at least one woman rose from 21.5 percent in 1994 to 29.4 percent in 2023. This increase occurred over nearly thirty years, yet fewer than one in three films still included a woman in either role by the end of the period.
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