The Diversity Gap in Directors

The argument that I’m making with this infographic is about diversity among directors. While there’s a slight increase in the amount of POC directed films and TV show episodes, when compared to their white counterparts, there’s still a long way to go in terms of media representation for POC.

I chose data points about how only 1.3 out of every 10 film directors is a person of color, how there’s only been a 0.4% increase in the amount of POC directors from the top 80% of films from 2011-2017, and how, when compared to the 2017-2018 season, there really hasn’t been much increase in African American, Asian American or Latino directors. 

I chose these data points because I thought they were the ones that conveyed a story the most. In the ongoing conversation about the lack of diversity behind the camera, there’s often the point that the industry is more diverse because there’s more inclusion on the screen. However, without changing the way films/episodes are made, directed, produced, written, etc., the stories of minority communities will not be told properly. In a 2019 VARIETY article “Women, People of Color Still Underrepresented Behind the Scenes, Study Says,” writer Adam Vary noted that “…racial and ethnic representation across every film industry metric — in front of and behind the camera, in executive suites, among film critics, and in the Academy — is still a long way from reflecting the diversity of the general population (40 percent people of color), which should be a base goal.” Again, I wanted to emphasize that there is a lot to be done before we can claim that there is diverstiy behind the cameras. 

So I started the infographic with the shocking data point about 1.3 in every 10 film directors were POC in 2017. Then I wanted to show that there really hasn’t been any progress, and put it data points from 2011 and 2017 that showed that there was only a .04% increase in the number of films that were directed by POC. Then to really have that sink in, I put in data points about how compared to the 2017-2018 season, there still wasn’t much improvement in the amount of African American, Asian American or Latino directors, with each increasing by 2%, 0% and 1%, respectively. 

I chose to visualize the first couple of data points with colored in icons to show the ratio of POC directors and white directors–I thought that being able to see just how many more white ones there are compared to people of color would he helpful to get my point across. For the data points comparing 2011 to 2017, I also wanted to use illustrated icons to show that there has virtually no increase in the percent of films directed by POC. Lastly, for the data points comparing the percent of episodes directed by African American, Asian American or Latino directors from 2017-2018 vs 2018-2019, I made a line graph, since I thought that would show that there was very little change in the number and in turn, that there hasn’t been much progress made at all over time. I kept my color theme gold, red, black and white because these colors are associated with the theater.