WGA Issues Diversity Report

Posted on May 8, 2007

The Writers Guild of American (WGA) has issued a new report on diversity and it looks pretty much like the last diversity report, i.e. not so diverse.

The "2007 Hollywood Writers Report -- Whose Stories Are We Telling?" was written by Darnell Hunt, director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies and professor of sociology at UCLA. Hunt was the author involved in a similar WGAW-commissioned report in 2005 and also participated in a study of TV employment released by SAG in 2000.
Based on analysis of minority- and gender-based data, the latest WGA report encompasses employment and earning trends through 2005. Minority writers made scant progress in any sector in the study period.
"More than 30% of the American population is non-white, yet writers of color continue to account for less than 10% of employed television writers," Hunt noted in an executive summary of the report. "These numbers will likely get worse before they get better because of the recent merger of UPN and the WB into the new CW Network, which resulted in the cancellation of several minority-themed situation comedies that employed a disproportionate share of minority television writers.
"The situation is grimmer in film," he added, " where the minority share of employment has been stuck at 6% for years." The report also documented an earnings disparity for minority writers in television that widened by more than $6,000 between 2004 and 2005. The overall median earnings for minority TV writers in 2005 was $78,107, compared to $97,956 for white writers.

The WGA president released a statement with the report asking decision-makers in the industry to "actively seek out and read the work of writers who are women and people of color. As part of a unified guild, we must all be allowed to compete for opportunities so that all our stories may have an equal chance to be heard."