By Tanya Sakzewski
The hurdles facing women in film and screen industries are well known: they receive fewer nominations in major awards and less funding, among others.
At the recent Emmy Awards, women were again underrepresented in nominations in non-acting categories. According to the Women’s Media Center the total number this year reached 35 per cent, a figure which has never been exceeded.
The 2026 Academy Awards saw a notable increase in representation, yet the Women’s Media Center says despite that women continue to make up less than one-third (32 per cent) of nominees in non-acting categories.
To address underrepresentation in the UK, the Baftas has mandated that the directors list must include 50 per cent women.
Yet despite equality efforts and some improvements in recognition, the issue of men attracting far more funding than women is holding many female-led initiatives back.
Recent research is exposing some of the reasons behind that disparity and raising questions about gender imbalance and sound investment strategies.
Women outperforming men in profits
A report by Anja Huwiler at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz says the financial logic of women remaining underrepresented as directors and screenwriters in commercial film is unclear.
An examination of 199,656 feature-length narrative films released worldwide between 1994 and 2023, found that 73.8 per cent of films credited no women in either role.
Analysing financial information on more than 4,000 commercially documented movies, the report found that films with a woman screenwriter and no woman director showed 34 per cent higher median profits than male-only productions despite comparable budgets.
Films with women in both directing and screenwriting roles matched male-only returns while operating on approximately half the budget.
Yet, despite that, no film with a woman director or a woman in both roles over a 30-year period was in the top 1 per cent of production budgets.
As the report author states, these findings constitute an “economically puzzling disconnect in which observed return distributions do not straightforwardly account for the allocation of production capital”.
The reasons for gender bias in funding
A report from the UK has tried to find the reasons for that financial disconnect.
Creative UK spoke to female business leaders in the screen business, which includes animation, digital content, video games, film and TV production, for its report The Investment Gap: Understanding Investment Barriers for Female Founders.
Female-led screen businesses secure around half the amount of external funding as their male counterparts. They also receive a smaller share (29 per cent) of total investment in the sector, despite constituting 41 per cent of screen businesses.
Creative UK wanted to gain an understanding of the dynamics behind those statistics so it asked female leaders, who share the aim of wanting to escape project-to-project cycles and build sustainable businesses, about their experiences of searching for and engaging with investors. It found that women face more barriers accessing financing and a ‘far less hospitable investment market’.
The report found that that cognitive gender bias shapes every stage of the finance process, with women’s expertise underestimated and projections doubted. Racial bias compounds this for founders of colour.
Those interviewed consistently reported that investors underestimated their expertise. Despite being in the film industry and leading businesses for decades, they were often directly interrogated by investors on their understanding of their own product and offered training and courses to understand their own sector. Their financial knowledge and understanding were also repeatedly challenged and doubted.
Even where the women founders saw their capabilities and skills respected by investors, they found that this meant that they were perceived as diligent workers and reliable deliverers as opposed to leaders.
The report also found that structural barriers, like childcare, class, geography, and the economics of film financing, reinforce these interpersonal dynamics, limiting access to networks and making investment-readiness harder to achieve.
What’s needed to change the dynamic?
The Creative UK report makes several recommendations to address the key challenges facing female founders in their efforts to navigate, engage with and successfully access investors and the investment and financing landscape.
They include:
- Equip founders to choose the right finance, negotiate effectively in gendered environments, and protect their legal and financial rights.
- Expand mentorship beyond formal programmes and build reciprocal network models that share opportunities and reduce gatekeeping.
- Reshape how networking happens, daytime formats alongside evening events, and structured cross-sector opportunities connecting investors with female founders.
- Demonstrate the commercial case for screen sector and female-led investment to reduce bias, close information gaps, and attract new investors.
The outlook for diversity
If these recommendations are adopted, it could be some time before we see the impact.
In the meantime, other actions will be needed to kickstart gender equality in the creative industry, where some progress has slowed and even stalled.
A USC Annenberg report, released in December 2025, found there has a been a reversal of progress for female directors, with the percentage and number of women working as directors falling in 2025 to 8.1 per cent from 13.4 per cent a year earlier. The 2025 number was practically the same as 2008.
It’s not just the number of women in the industry and the positions and influence they hold at stake, but also their ability to tell their own stories their own way. For audiences, it means a more diverse and rich offering.
