Amidst all the glamour and splendour, there may be a glaring disparity persisting: the gender gap. In 2022, there was an “O Womaniya!” report released. The report studied close to 160 movies and series released in 2022 in 8 Indian languages. This was conducted by Ormax Media and Film Companion, with the support of Amazon Prime Video. This outlines the representation of women across different facets of content production, marketing and corporate leadership within India’s entertainment industry. According to this report, women continue to hold less than 15% of senior leadership roles in the Indian media and entertainment industry.
This is based on 135 director and CXO positions across the top 25 M&E companies in India. And less than 15% of 780 head of department positions across departments, like direction, cinematography, editing, writing and production design, were occupied by females. In the content realm, the Bechdel Test is the metric. This is named after Alison Bechdel and this test has become a yardstick for evaluating gender representation in content. To pass this test, a work of fiction must feature at least one scene where two female characters converse about a subject other than men or romance.
But, according to the report, more than half of the theatrical releases looked at in 2022 failed to clear this gender representation test. The percentage of movies passing the Bechdel Test was less than 50% in 2022. It was said that streaming films had close to 35% of talk time in trailers allocated to women, more than theatrical releases. It may be that streaming may be leading the way for female representation, but theatrical films are said to have more of a lackluster performance. At the same time, industry figures like Bollywood performer Alia Bhatt, Bollywood director Shakun Batra, Dharma Productions CEO Apoorva Mehta and more have pledged to promote diversity in their projects and workplaces.
