In 2023, there were 20 women or nonbinary filmmakers who directed movies on IMDb Pro’s top 100 list.
In 2024, the number dipped to 14.
In 2025, it dropped to 11.
“We’re seeing the numbers go backward,” Kirsten Schaffer, the CEO of WIF (formerly known as Women in Film Los Angeles), tells me on this week’s Rushfield Lunch.
Every year since 2017, ReFrame, the gender equity coalition founded by WIF and the Sundance Institute, has put out an annual report on the state of women working in Hollywood. For 2025, the numbers were rough: the fewest gender-balanced productions — meaning not just female directors but also department heads and crew — in six years.
“From a macro perspective, it’s not only our industry, right? It’s all culture,” Schaffer says, citing the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the general misogynistic messaging that permeates from the White House and beyond. “I come from a generation of people who expected there would always be forward motion and didn’t quite expect the pushback.”
The sad state of studios hiring women to direct has been on my mind for months. “We feel good about these brownie points that we’ve earned, that we’ve moved the needle forward a little bit on just opening up that perspective and the room in which we’re allowed to take up as female artists,” Kristen Stewart previously told me. “But at the same time. It’s just a crock of shit.”
Schaffer says the issue is compounded by the industry’s overall state of affairs, with fewer jobs and risk-averse thinking from executives trickling down the line.
“When we’re in a kind of scarcity mindset, people fall back on what they know — on the people they know, the networks they’re connected to,” Schaffer says.
And when the people in charge are men, they look to their “buddies” before anyone else.
“I heard from another director that she was out to lunch with a group of female directors, and they’re hearing things like people are just openly saying to them, ‘We hired enough women on that season,’” she says.
Still, it’s not all doom and gloom. KPop Demon Hunters, the biggest streaming movie of all time, was co-written by two people who came out of the WIF lab that the org co-runs with The Black List. One of 2026’s biggest hits so far is Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights. And The Housemaid, although directed by a man (Paul Feig), was written by a woman (Rebecca Sonnenshine). It made more money worldwide than Sinners.
“Paul is such a champion of female directors,” Schaffer says. “He works with almost all female producers. It’s that kind of champion, I think, that we need more of.”
