After sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein ignited the #MeToo movement on social media, Hollywood producers began hiring more female film writers than they did before the scandal, new research finds.
What's more, producers who had collaborated with Weinstein before the scandal came to light in 2017 are substantially more likely than those without such prior ties to bring on female writers following the #MeToo movement, according to a forthcoming article in Management Science titled Scandal, Social Movement, and Change: Evidence from #MeToo in Hollywood.
Female producers appear to be particularly sympathetic to #MeToo’s call to empower women and are the main driver of the shift to hire more women following the scandal, write Hong Luo and Laurina Zhang, the paper's authors. Luo is the James Dinan and Elizabeth Miller Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Zhang is Assistant Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.
Although the study results show the #MeToo movement has prompted meaningful change in Hollywood, the authors were somewhat surprised that male producers weren’t more involved in spurring that change.
"You’d think male producers ... would be the ones with the greatest incentive to work more with female talent."
“You’d think male producers, especially those who had ties with Harvey Weinstein, would be the ones with the greatest incentive to work more with female talent so that they can lessen the negative public perception and media scrutiny,” Luo says. “We do see an increase in their likelihood of working with female writers after #MeToo, but much less so than female producers.”
In fact, among producers who had been associated with Weinstein, half as many all-male production teams hired more female writers after #MeToo than teams that included at least one female producer. This is despite the fact that before #MeToo, female producers were already twice as likely to work with female writers as male producers.
For women, Hollywood can be a tough place to work. Female representation in movies has been consistently low, with women making up only 4.5 percent of directors and 14.4 percent of writers for top-grossing films. Worse, many women have endured sexual harassment and abuse. In October 2017, the New York Times and the New Yorker magazine published articles about several women who alleged that Weinstein sexually harassed them, and three who accused him of rape. In January 2020, Weinstein was convicted of sex crimes and was sentenced to 23 years in prison.
Soon after the sexual abuse allegations against Weinstein came to light, actress Alyssa Milano asked women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted to publicly declare “me too,” a phrase initially used in this context in 2006 on MySpace by sexual harassment survivor and activist Tarana Burke. More than 1.7 million tweets from 85 countries included the hashtag within the first week, and by September 2018, #MeToo had been tweeted more than 19 million times. The #MeToo movement, which led to the firing of hundreds of other powerful men accused of sexual harassment in several job sectors, was seen as a call to action for the film industry.
Measuring the impact of #MeToo
To assess whether this social movement impacted the hiring of female talent, Luo and Zhang focused on new movie projects set up from January 2014 to September 2019 using Done Deal Pro, a database that tracks script deals. They also used information from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), a publicly availably source with detailed information about movies, casts, and crews, to construct a producer’s past collaborations with Weinstein.
The authors looked at 4,188 projects after excluding producers who faced allegations of sexual harassment following #MeToo as well as nixing projects that lacked information about the producers and writers. Luo and Zhang chose to focus on the hiring of writers because they are involved in the earliest stages of a project and often help define its trajectory.
Writers are “either the original creators or have major input in adapting screenplays” and are “critical at the start of a project,” the researchers note.
“The choice of the writer (and his/her gender), to a great extent, influences or correlates with later choices—including the hiring of a director and actors/actresses—and signals the type of working environment the producers want to create,” Luo and Zhang write.
Compared to projects by producers without past collaborations with Weinstein, the researchers found that projects by producers who had ties to Weinstein were 8.9 percentage points more likely to work with female writers after the scandal than before. That’s about a 35 percent increase.
“Examining the differential change due to the association with Weinstein is critical. It helps better nail down the specific effect of #MeToo. Those without prior ties to Weinstein serve as a control group,” Luo explains. “Changes in their behavior help account for the impact of other societal trends that took place around the same time as #MeToo and, of course, any industry-level impact of #MeToo.”
“Producers were also not merely hiring a ‘token’ woman writer,” Zhang stresses. The change is not because of an expansion of the size of the writer teams. Rather, producers appeared to have replaced male writers with female writers with similar experience levels.
When women are the decision makers
Since production teams with female producers are doing most of that hiring of other women, the research points to how key it is for women to hold high-level decision-making roles. “The results highlight the importance of having women in senior positions with decision-making latitude and empowerment to enact change,” Zhang says.
It could be that women are more likely to hire women because issues highlighted by #MeToo “resonate more with female producers,” or it could be because it is easier for female producers to identify and attract female writers, the researchers explain.
The study results have wider implications in that they reinforce what many business leaders already suspect—social movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter are powerful and are becoming an “increasingly important force in firm decision-making,” the authors write.
"We need more systematic research on the movement’s impact in other settings."
The researchers caution that their study looks at early changes following #MeToo—plus, it examines just one high-profile industry.
“Our setting is, in some sense, one of the easiest to find some effect, partly because it's the epicenter of the scandal and the #MeToo movement. Second, because it's Hollywood. Everybody pays attention to it, and attention brings pressure,” Luo says. “Many sectors like entertainment, politics, elite universities, sports—these are the sectors that also receive significant media attention. But there are so many other settings like the service sector, non-white elite, and middle class women that don’t receive the news coverage. We need more systematic research on the movement’s impact in other settings.”
About the Author
Rachel Layne is a writer based in the Boston area.
[Image: iStockphoto/sizsus]
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