Oscars Gender Gap Narrows: Women Directed Record 27% of Best Picture Contenders

While Hollywood is still a long way from gender parity, the fight to get more women in the director’s chair hit a milestone this year: For the first time, 27% of the 366 films eligible for this year’s Academy Award for Best Picture had a female director. That’s up from last year, when 23% of eligible films had a woman as director or co-director (79 out of 344 films) — and a marked improvement from five years ago, when only 15% did. “The percentage of female-identified directors in the Oscar race is encouraging,” Kirsten Schaffer, executive director of Women in Film, told TheWrap. “There has been a steady incline in the past three years and if that trend continues, we’ll get to parity by the end of 2026!” Of the 100 films in this year’s race with a female director, 38 were documentaries, reflecting an industry-wide trend of women finding more opportunities in nonfiction rather than scripted films. A gender breakdown of Best Documentary Feature contenders shows that the category has almost achieved gender parity, with 46% of eligible docs (110 out of 238 films) having a female director. That percentage just tops the previous high for the category of...

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