ABSTRACT
For film and television practitioners in Hollywood, the gender gap becomes a question not only of who is hired, but what work they are asked to do. In order to engage with questions about gender equality (or inequality) in screen production, in my research, I explore theories of professional identity through the lens of labor studies and production economics. Quantitative assessments of the gender gap in film and television production often make broad claims based on overall percentages of women working within the industry.1 Gender disparity is a critical issue in Hollywood, but in order to understand the nature of the professional landscape, it is crucial to look not just at the overall numbers, but to examine the gendering of individual professions within the industry. In other words,my interest is not solely in the gender of workers (the biological sex of individuals within certain professions), but in the gendering of work (in terms of how a particular profession might be socially constructed though gender). Here, I highlight practitioners’ own perceptions of their work while framing it within a cultural history of the economic and professional hierarchies inherent in screen production.
