The Critics’ Choice Awards provided an extremely fast follow-up to the Golden Globes, an event where Time’s Up dominated and women’s representation—especially in categories like directing—were hot topics of conversation. The Thursday evening award ceremony, however, lacked a lot of the punch of Sunday evening’s epic kick-off. Gone were the Time’s Up pins and speeches about women’s empowerment—with a few noteworthy exceptions like Gal Godot’s “See Her” award, featuring a rousing introduction by Wonder Woman director (and 2017 Glamour Woman of the Year) Patty Jenkins. There were some uncomfortable moments, like Elisabeth Moss getting played off after accepting her award for The Handmaid’s Tale.
For this award season, we’re eschewing some of the standard fare of previous years—consistent “Best Dressed” round-ups, for example—to focus on spotlighting the ways women are changing Hollywood, from record-breaking awards to the characters redefining how woman are portrayed on-screen. We’re also digging into the data behind key categories at all the major award shows. Just how often do women get nominated? And how often do they win? And are we getting better at being truly representative of the people watching TV and film?
Our reasoning is simple: we believe that better representation—both in front of and behind the camera—means healthier workplaces, and better storytelling.
In the case of the Critics’ Choice Awards, categories like directing are just as lacking when it comes to women as its peers. (The Golden Globes, for example, didn’t nominate a single female director this year, and a woman hasn’t won in this category since 1984.) We break down the honorees since 1995 in this chart. (Note that in some years, there was only a winner that was honored—no nominees—and that years correspond to the year in which film hit screens.) While Greta Gerwig was nominated for Ladybird, the 2017 winner in this category was Guillermo Del Toro. The only female Critics’ Choice Award winner for Best Director since 1995 was Kathryn Bigelow, for The Hurt Locker.
In addition, we looked at the recent data—from 2009-2017—across a variety of gender-neutral categories like Editing and Best Original Screenplay, and found that here, too, women are woefully underrepresented. Categories like Editing, Adapted Screenplay, and Director have had only one winner who identifies a female since 2009; there have been zero female winners for Original Screenplay in that time.
You can filter the results by clicking on any of the categories at the top, and you can also hover over any of the individual squares to see the nominee—male (in gray) or female (in peach)—and the work for which they were nominated.
To be sure, this data is just a limited window into women’s representation in the overall business—and also doesn’t factor in the inequality that women of color, for example, face—but even this limited window offers a stark portrait of how far we have to go. The good news, at least, is that we’re speaking up and getting loud. Change is sure to follow.
Graphic: Condé Nast Data Visualization
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