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By Sharon Weinberg, Chris Breitenbach, and Rummanah Aasi

Women have been making movies since 1896. Do you know how many women have won the Academy Award for Best Director? The answer is three. Kathryn Bigelow won the first, in 2010 at the 82nd Academy Awards for The Hurt Locker. In 2021, Chloé Zhao took home the Oscar for Nomadland and became the second woman and first woman of Asian descent to win. Jane Campion got the Best Director award in 2022 for Power of the Dog.

In 2023, the highest-grossing movie in the world was Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. Receiving wide critical acclaim and becoming a cultural phenomenon, it seemed like Hollywood was ready to embrace female filmmakers. However, she did not receive an Oscar nomination for Best Director. A recent study called Inclusion in the Director’s Chair: Analysis of Director Gender and Race/Ethnicity Across the 1,700 Top Films from 2007 to 2023 by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, a research organization that studies diversity and inclusion in the entertainment industry through data-driven analysis, revealed otherwise. The chart below shows the shocking discrepancy between male and female directors in the movie industry.

You might be wondering why more women are not directing films. What are the barriers they face?

For her 2015 New York Times piece “The Women of Hollywood Speak Out,” Maureen Dowd interviewed more than 100 actors, executives, and filmmakers about their experiences and observations working in Hollywood. They speak frankly about the pervasive sexism in the entertainment industry.

The informative 2018 documentary Half the Picture builds on Maureen Dowd's piece. It demonstrates that this is not only a case of sexism. There are other entrenched practices and hurdles, including implicit bias, stereotyping, lack of financial support, availability of equipment, and unequal opportunities to network with industry decision-makers that prevent women from getting their feet in the door. 

The situation spurred an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation and a letter to the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California in 2015 to hold Hollywood accountable for gender discrimination. Despite legal involvement, we have not seen progress toward inclusion. 

As difficult as it is for some women directors to get approval and encouragement, there are even more obstacles for women directors from underrepresented, marginalized groups. The below startling image from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative shows the common assumption that a woman filmmaker is essentially a white woman filmmaker.

Filmmaker Ava DuVernay (Selma) candidly talked about the challenges minority and women filmmakers face during the 2015 Los Angeles Film Festival: “We make these projects within a sphere, within a system that is not built to support varied voices. It’s not built to support them, nourish them, or amplify them…This patriarchy is often shocked when a Black film does well, or shocked when a film directed by a woman does well. That strips away the legacy from where that filmmaker comes from.”

Director Patricia Riggen (Under the Same Moon) states in the documentary Half the Picture, “I have shed so many tears, and spent so many sleepless nights, you know, trying to understand ‘why is it so hard?’ And I know now part of the why is it so hard is because of the way I look.”

Even though women are underrepresented in the industry, they’re certainly well-represented in the library's collection. Here are some lists we’ve created to help you get started. They include a lot of our favorite movies from a variety of genres across the world that deserve the same viewership and investment as their male contenders. Keep in mind that there are a multitude of movies we couldn’t include, but we’re always ready to talk to you about films directed by women.