ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 argues that women’s experience of media work is shaped by the gendering of roles, which is a subtle structuring principle applied by a community of media workers that serves to reproduce traditional gender ideas about women and work. Horizontal and vertical segregation of roles creates and recreates received ideas about women’s entitlement to participate in various areas of screen production. Gendered structures within the production processes are created in media industries through the allocation of certain types of roles to women, such as the role of emotional worker. Women experience the roles of mentor and sponsor differently to men and so they receive differential promotions, rewards and progression opportunities. At the outset of their careers, a cultural entanglement of masculinity with risk-taking benefited male employees while younger women observed that their ‘apprenticeship’ to the industry was less privileged and endured for longer than that of their male counterparts. A further problem is that the networked nature of production work, which dictates who gets which roles, makes it particularly difficult for women to assert their rights, for fear of gaining a reputation within networks for being ‘difficult’ or ‘troublesome’ and thereby risking future work. At core the allocation of roles in a gendered manner dictates the speed, rate and extent of their successes and failures in screen production.
