Screen Australia

• Well-intentioned policymakers have made many attempts to intervene over the past 50 years or so, focusing primarily on addressing gender imbalances using a “just add women and stir” approach.
• Instead, we need to take a detailed view of who works in the Australian film industry, and understand the specific challenges they face.

Building a camera department

• Our recently published research finds inequitable power dynamics behind the camera on Australian film sets are pernicious and persistent.
• The camera department is headed by a director of photography (DOP or cinematographer), and is made up of a variety of positions including camera operators, camera assistants, gaffers and grips.
• This percentage lifts slightly to the 4% observed in other industry data when we account for women who worked across multiple camera department roles including director of photography.
• This discrepancy reveals how women DOPs are more likely than men to work across other (less prestigious) camera department roles.

What does a cinematographer look like?

• Not surprisingly, the dominant and most successful in-group was Anglo-Celtic heterosexual men (37% of the total sample).
• Another cohort, sharing some of the same features, is made up of heterosexual men from non-Anglo-Celtic ethnicities (34.5%).
• (A small percentage of people were not able to be assigned to any of these groupings because of missing information.)

Workplace power

• Experiences of discrimination and harassment tend to be found in the two “out-groups” and, to a lesser extent, among men from underrepresented ethnicities.
• We found 88% of heterosexual women reported experiencing sexism, and 39% of respondents from the sexuality and gender minorities group reported experiencing homophobia.
• Read more:
  ‘The number one barrier has probably been stigma’: the challenges facing disabled workers in the Australian screen industry

Rethinking the industry

• Typical policies focus on the idea that individuals from under-represented groups can succeed if they get more training or personal skills development.
• This means rethinking how the agencies and guilds that endorse the industry define its values, how the business and operational layers of the film industry work to reinforce discrimination, and how such inequitable production teams are brought together.
• On the set and in the boardrooms where decisions are made, screen industry workplaces need to be regulated to ensure zero tolerance for toxic behaviours and structural discrimination.
• He is a member of the Media, Arts and Entertainment Alliance, a union that represents workers in the screen industries.