The lack of major female characters and people of color in Hollywood is a major problem in Hollywood, and sadly, it looks like the issue also plagues projects behind-the-scenes as well: ThinkProgress is reporting, per the Writers Guild of America West's recently released 2013 TV Staffing Brief, that between 2011 and 2012, 55 television shows hired no writers of color, and 19 hired no women writers. In other words: Most of the writers rooms for television shows last year were filled with white men.
A bit of a breakdown of the stats: Of the 1722 writers who were employed between 2011 and 2012, between 190 shows, only 519 of them were women, or 30.5 percent. This is up slightly from 1999-2000, but only by five percent. The percentage of Asian and Latino writers is up 2.9 percent since 1999-2000, but only up .063 percent for African-Americans - at that rate of growth, it will basically take 87 years for the amount of African-American television writers to proportionally represent their current presence in the country's population.
As for new hirings between 2011 and 2012, the 19 shows that didn't hire women were:
None
And the 55 shows that didn't hire people of color:
None
As ThinkProgress points out, just because a show is written by an all-male, mostly white staff doesn't necessarily mean it won't capture women or people of color correctly - Enlightened and Breaking Bad are brought up as good examples of this - but the statistics are still pretty jarring. Especially because a few of the shows on the lists could do with new additions to their writers' rooms.
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[via ThinkProgress]
