Report shows little diversity progress among writers

The push to increase diversity among showbiz writers remains an uphill battle, a new report concludes. The WGA West's 2009 Hollywood Writers Report finds "little if any" improvement in employment and earnings for women and minority writers. The report, authored by UCLA professor Darnell Hunt and recently posted on the WGA Web site, found that women scribes remain stuck at 28% of TV employment and 18% in features while the minority share has been frozen at 6% since 1999. "White males continue to dominate in both the film and television sectors," Hunt wrote. "Although women and minorities closed the earnings gaps with white men in television a bit, the earnings gaps in film grew. These findings are clearly out of step with a nation that elected its first African American president in 2008, a nation in which more than half of the population is female and nearly a third is non-white." The report is the sixth such document generated for the WGA West and focuses on guild data between 2003 and 2007.