While the percentage of directors of top-grossing films who were women rose in 2019, racial/ethnic diversity in the industry's top ranks remains low, a report from the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative finds.

Based on an analysis of the hundred top-grossing films released each year between 2007 and 2019, the latest edition of the Inclusion in the Director's Chair report (26 pages, PDF) found that women accounted for 10.6 percent of the directors of last year's most popular films, up from 4.5 percent in 2018 and well above the previous high of 8 percent in 2008. At the same time, of the 1,448 directors of the thirteen hundred top films since 2007, fifty-seven, or just 4.8 percent, were women. Meanwhile, a comparison of Metacritic scores — an aggregate and weighted mean across reviews — found no difference between films by male directors (median, 54; average, 54.2) and female directors (55 and 55.8). According to the report, female directors face a pipeline problem: although women comprised 34.5 percent of feature film directors in the Sundance Film Festival's U.S. Dramatic Competition between 2015 and 2019, 31 percent of episodic television directors from 2018 to 2019, and 20 percent of Netflix directors, few go on to direct top-grossing films.

The study also found that the percentage of directors from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups — whose Metacritic scores (median, 54; average, 54.9) are comparable to those of their white peers (54 and 54.2) — fell in 2019 to 16.8 percent, from 21.4 percent in 2018, or 13.5 percent overall since 2007, and that 82.5 percent of top directors since 2007 have been white men, while only 12.6 percent were men of color, 3.9 percent were white women, and fewer than 1 percent (eleven of the fifty-seven women on the list) were women of color — despite four women of color directing a top-hundred-grossing film in 2019.

"Women of color received the highest median and average Metacritic scores for their films compared to white male-, underrepresented male-, and white female-directed content," said Annenberg Inclusion Initiative founder and director Stacy L. Smith. "Yet, women of color are least likely to work as directors across the top one hundred films each year. These findings suggest that when companies seek to hire 'the best person for the job', they are not relying on objective criteria but on a subjective view of storytellers....While 2019 is a banner year for women, we will not be able to say there is true change until all women have access and opportunity to work at this level."