Search

This article draws on the 2018 Writers Guild of Great Britain report 'Gender Inequality and Screenwriters', and original interviews with female screenwriters, to assess how the experience of genre plays out in the UK television industry. The report focuses on the experience of women, as a single category, but we aim to reveal a more intersectional understanding of their experiences. Our aim is to better understand the ways in which women are, according to the report, consistently 'pigeonholed by genre and are unable to move from continuing drama or children's programming to prime-time drama, comedy or light-entertainment'. Considering the cultural value of genre in relation to screenwriting labour and career progression, we analyse how genre shapes career trajectory, arguing that social mobility for female screenwriters is inherently different and unequal to that of their male counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The film industry offers an exemplary case study for examining the recruitment processes to which the 'socialized worker' (Gill and Pratt, 2008) is subject. Even among the creative industries, film is exceptional in its reliance on networking andword of mouth as its primary - and in many cases only - tool for recruitment and for identifying the 'right' candidate for the job (Blair, 2000a). Increasingly there is evidence that reliance on personal networks and informal employment practices has different outcomes for men and women (Grugulis and Stoyanova, 2012). Hiring on short-term contracts in a context of ambiguity, risk and uncertainty, necessitates reliance on social networks and informal subjective criteria, with outcomes that reinforce the status quo (Bielby and Bielby, 1999). Fenstermaker, West and Zimmerman argue that to overcome gender inequality 'we will need to understand the mechanisms by which it is sustained in institutional social arrangements' (Fenstermaker et al., 2002: 38). This article will unpack how recruitment procedures that rely on 'connections' and 'affinities of habitus' (Bourdieu, 1984: 151) can contribute to the way that gender inequality is sustained for screenwriters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]