The 2009 Hollywood Writers Report found that women scribes remain stuck at 28% of TV employment and 18% in features while the minority share has been frozen at 6% since 1999.
For minorities, the earnings gap in TV declined between 2003 and 2007 as minority TV writers earned $75,658 two years ago while white male writers averaged $87,984. But in film, the gap has widened significantly with $87,392 for minorities in 2003 versus $90,476 for white male. Minority earnings in film slid to $61,912 in 2007 while white male earnings increased to $98,875.
“White males continue to dominate in both the film and television sectors,” Hunt wrote. “Although women and minorities closed the earnings gaps with white men in television a bit, the earnings gaps in film grew. These findings are clearly out of step with a nation that elected its first African American president in 2008, a nation in which more than half of the population is female and nearly a third is non-white.”
The report is the sixth such document generated for the WGA West and focuses on guild data between 2003 and 2007 — showing, for example, that women TV writers earned about the same in 2007 ($82,604) as they did at the beginning of the five-year report period in 2003 ($82,000) with spikes in 2005 and 2006 while white male writers saw a gain of nearly $4,000 over the report period (from $84,300 to $87,984) after peaking at $100,000 in 2005 and 2006 as earnings for most writers declined in 2007 due to the writers’ strike.
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