{"id":1815,"date":"2018-05-25T07:45:10","date_gmt":"2018-05-25T07:45:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/?p=1815"},"modified":"2018-05-25T07:42:42","modified_gmt":"2018-05-25T07:42:42","slug":"women-and-losing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2018\/05\/25\/women-and-losing\/","title":{"rendered":"Women and losing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Give me a situation where one man and one woman are competing to write a particular piece of drama and I will ask why you bothered telling me their gender. It\u2019s the piece I\u2019m interested in, it\u2019s their writing. I can\u2019t conceive of a single possible reason that my knowing the sex of the writer would make any more difference than knowing their height.<\/p>\n

Only, give me a situation where 86 percent of primetime television is written by men and now gender matters, now sex\u00a0is telling me something is seriously wrong here.<\/p>\n

Writing is not fair but then it shouldn\u2019t be. Writers don\u2019t get work just because it\u2019s their turn. Not everybody should get to have a go. Because as much as I am a writer, as much as I care about writers, I\u2019m a viewer first. I don\u2019t tune in to satisfy a need in me for statistical balance. I tune in to watch and to be transported by writing that takes me places I don\u2019t know with characters I\u2019ve never met.<\/p>\n

I want new.<\/p>\n

And I ain\u2019t getting it when 86 percent of television drama\u00a0is written by men.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not as if you suspect these men are the most diverse group, either, and that\u2019s something the Writers\u2019 Guild is looking at with Equality Writes<\/a>. That\u2019s a campaign launched this week that wants to fix film and television by making the industry recognise what\u2019s actually happening. Get programme makers talking about it, get audiences talking about it, and maybe we can finally do something about it too.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Equality Writes starts with men and women because there are figures you can get for that imbalance. That\u2019s why I know the 86 percent figure: it was uncovered during the research for an exhaustive and exhausting report<\/a> that the Writers\u2019 Guild commissioned. I nearly didn\u2019t read that because I thought I already knew it was ridiculous how few women get to write for the screen. But then I\u2019d see the report\u2019s figures and then I\u2019d see the report\u2019s graphics about all this.<\/p>\n

I did hang on for a while to the hope that things are getting better. Plus it\u2019s a report about the industry today, maybe we\u2019re just in a peculiar slump.<\/p>\n

No and nope.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the real jolt of this report and this campaign to me: the percentage of women writing television and film has stayed consistent for the last decade.<\/p>\n

For \u2018consistent\u2019 read \u2018low\u2019 and for \u2018low\u2019 read \u2018crap\u2019. It is just crap how women aren\u2019t getting to write and it makes me blood-angry that something is stopping me getting to see the writing of half our species.<\/p>\n

I would like that to change now, please. And I work for the Writers\u2019 Guild, it makes me proud that they\u2019re doing something about it. Do join them, do join me in putting your name to the campaign too<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Give me a situation where one man and one woman are competing to write a particular piece of drama and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[178],"tags":[1322,1323,215,208,267,323,1321,212,453,1320,441,268,602,322,246,363,180],"class_list":["post-1815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-selfdistract","tag-bias","tag-commissioning","tag-drama","tag-film","tag-gender","tag-men","tag-report","tag-screenplays","tag-script","tag-scriptwriters","tag-scriptwriting","tag-sex","tag-television","tag-women","tag-writers","tag-writers-guild","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4chyI-th","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1815"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1823,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815\/revisions\/1823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}