Progress for women behind the camera was already stalling before the politics caught up. Now, with DEI dismantled across much of the US tech and entertainment landscape, the industry finds itself at what one leading researcher calls an "ominous moment."
It was International Women’s Day on March 8, and if you want a reason why it’s still a vital occasion to mark, there’s a phrase in the latest Celluloid Ceiling report that cuts to the quick. The report is the annual count of women working behind the camera on Hollywood's top-grossing films, and writing about the rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion programmes across the US entertainment industry, the report’s author Dr. Martha Lauzen says that while "Hollywood has never needed permission to exclude or diminish women, the industry now has it.”
All in all, the report is a grim read. In 2025, women accounted for just 23% of directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors and cinematographers working on the top 250 grossing films — a figure level with 2024 and, notably, level with 2020.
Five years of effort, and the needle has not moved.
Of those roles, the DOP chair remains the hardest to reach: women comprised just 7% of cinematographers on those films. And 75% of the top 250 productions employed 10 or more men in key behind-the-scenes roles, while only 7% employed 10 or more women.
The separate Annenberg Inclusion Initiative report from USC found that only nine women directed films in the top 100 grossing titles of 2025. That’s a seven-year low.
It would be easy to frame this as a story about Donald Trump's executive orders dismantling federal DEI programmes in January 2025, and then reference the subsequent retreat by Google, Meta, Amazon and others from diversity commitments they had made in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.
The picture is a more complex than that, however. As Annenberg's Dr. Stacy L. Smith states, it is clear that the film industry's backslide cannot be pinned on any single political moment.
"The 2025 data reveals that progress for women directors has been fleeting," she says in the report. "While it is tempting to think that these changes are a result of who is in the Oval Office, in reality these results are driven by executive decision-making that took place long before any DEI prohibitions took effect. Many of these films were greenlit and in pre-production before the 2024 election.”
The Annenberg report's conclusion is unflinching. Dr. Smith says the industry "stopped working for change before it became politically expedient."
Lauzen says the same thing in the Celluloid Ceiling: "It would not be a stretch to describe 2025 as an ominous moment for the film industry.”
Unexpectedly, the picture in television, and particularly in streaming, is different.
The latest Boxed In report, which tracks women's employment in broadcast and streaming television, recorded a historic high in the 2024–25 season: women accounted for 36% of creators on streaming programmes, up from 27% the year before. Directors of photography on streaming shows reached 10%, compared to just 3% on broadcast. Writers: 34% on streaming versus 27% on broadcast. Editors: 33% versus 17%.
As those figures show, broadcast TV, by contrast, flatlined. Women made up 20% of creators on broadcast network programmes, a figure barely changed since the late 1990s when the study began collecting data. The divergence between streaming and broadcast is a hugely significant data point, and it suggests that platform culture and commissioning structure matter as much as any formal DEI programme.
For UK and European readers, the picture is thankfully not identical to the US. Culturally, DEI is more embedded in Europe institutions, and in many countries enshrined in law.
BBC Director of Drama Lindsay Salt has said representation "is part of our charter and public purpose." ZDF's head of international fiction Jasmin Maeda described inclusion as a "strategic goal" for the German public broadcaster. Baroness Martha Lane Fox has argued the UK has an opportunity to "lean into diversity — to stand apart from the US.”
However, to paraphrase a well-known saying, the price of diversity is eternal vigilance. Diversity is under attack by MAGA-adjacent politicians in the UK and beyond, and we enter a new election cycle with the culture wars more front and center than they have been for a generation. That women’s fundamental equality is seen as a culture war weapon should be seen as a matter of shame across the continent.
Lauzen has been running the Celluloid Ceiling study for 28 years. In the 2025 report she writes that in 1998, women comprised 17% of individuals in key behind-the-scenes roles on the top 250 films. In 2025, they account for 23%. Six percentage points in 27 years.
"It's shameful as an industry, a culture and a human enterprise," she writes.
It does not have to be this way, however. The data from the Boxed In study demonstrates that when women are in the room as creators, they hire more women directors, writers and editors. Across streaming and linear television shows with at least one female creator, women made up 42% of directors, 62% of writers, and 32% of editors. Conversely on programmes with exclusively male creators, women accounted for 20% of directors, writers, and editors.
The pipeline that can deliver female talent to where it can make a difference is not broken, it’s blocked. And at a time when the political permission to block it has never been more explicit, especially in the US, the question is whether the industry is going to roll over and let that happen or remember the very visible role it can play in helping lead the way into a more equal future.
Think of it as permission denied.