A report by Ormax Media and Film Companion, supported by Amazon Prime Video, says that screen representation of women in India is not satisfactory and requires improvement.
The study found that only 10 per cent of behind-the-camera HOD positions were held by women across categories such as production design, writing, editing, direction and cinematography, etc. Even in media and entertainment corporate companies, women occupy only 10 per cent of senior roles.
Even on-screen representation of women hasn’t been great. Only 55 per cent of the films passed the Bechdel Test (a measure of representation of women in fiction). In trailers, women had only 25 per cent of talk time. In fact, several movies had female representation for less than 10 seconds in their trailers.
However, the report points out that each time a woman was spearheading a film or a series, the female representation went way up. 68 per cent of those films passed the Bechdel test, women had a higher surface space in the trailer, and even the percentage of female HODs doubled up. Films and series on OTT platforms had better female representation on- and off-screen.
Shailesh Kapoor, founder-CEO, Ormax Media, said: “While streaming titles, especially series, are more women-inclusive in on- and off-screen representation, theatrical films continue to perform very poorly, and in fact, have shown no positive growth at all since the previous report, which covered content released in 2019 and 2020. We hope that this report serves as a starting point for the industry to come together and discuss ways to address the evident imbalance.”
Vidya Balan said that having more female decision-makers in the industry are required to fix the representation of women in it, on- and off-screen.
The report was in collaboration with the Producers Guild of India and Active Telugu Film Producers Guild, streamers Hoichoi, SonyLIV, Voot and ZEE5, and studios Clean Slate Filmz, Dharma Productions, Emmay Entertainment, Excel Entertainment, Purple Pebble Pictures, RSVP and Sikhya Entertainment, analyzed 150 theatrical films, streaming films and series released in 2021 across eight Indian languages.