Selecting our Sources
To investigate gender inequality in the film industry, we examined a range of peer-reviewed studies, industry reports, and digital media analyses that document the structural barriers women face in creative and leadership roles. These sources included sociological studies of Hollywood hiring practices, statistical reports on director and screenwriter representation, analyses of film festival circulation networks, and qualitative work on how digital feminist creators navigate commodified “authenticity.” Together, these materials provided a multidimensional view of how gender shapes access, opportunity, and visibility across multiple areas of media production.
To broaden our understanding of how inequality operates beyond Hollywood itself, we incorporated research that addressed related structural forces in adjacent cultural industries, such as corporate boardrooms, independent media work, and digital content creation. These sources allowed us to compare the patterns emerging across film, online platforms, and organizational leadership, highlighting how discrimination persists through hiring pipelines, informal networks, budget allocation practices, and the consolidation of decision-making power among men. This comparative approach helped us see the industry not as an isolated system, but as part of a broader landscape of gendered labor.
Before drawing conclusions, we evaluated the potential limitations and silences in the research we relied on. Some studies depend on self-reported experiences that do not capture hidden discrimination; others draw from datasets shaped by institutional gatekeepers, such as major studios or festival circuits that control what projects are financed, selected, or widely distributed. We also considered how academic and industry frameworks themselves may reproduce certain assumptions about talent, meritocracy, and “market demand,” which can obscure deeper structural biases.
Alongside academic literature, we reviewed industry statistics, nonprofit reports, and publicly available datasets documenting hiring trends, budget disparities, and representation figures in film production. This combination of qualitative and quantitative sources gave us both narrative and empirical foundations for understanding how inequality persists across production, distribution, and career advancement. We synthesized these materials to form a holistic perspective on how gendered barriers shape filmmaking at every stage. More information about our sources can be found in our annotated bibliography.
To investigate representation, production and success in the film-making industry, we mainly worked with the “Full Movielens Dataset” that was compiled by data scientist Rounak Banik, hosted on the Kaggle website. The dataset is merged from information from TMDB (The Movie Database), GroupLens, and Open API sources. The original intention for the creation of this dataset was for box-office prediction research. This dataset allows us to explore variables, most importantly being budget, revenue, genres, popularity, vote averages, vote counts, director gender, and overview.
Before interpreting our data, we reflected on potential silences that could emerge at various stages of our process– such as during silences in the original dataset (e.g. absence of demographic information, limited representation of independent films, biases introduced before the creation of the dataset); during data compilation (e.g. having to merge multiple datasets with different levels of information); and during the analysis of the data in the context of our project. Trouillot’s Silencing the Past provided the insights for our critiques. More information about the dataset can be found on our Data Critique page.
Along with our main dataset, we reviewed various peer-reviewed sources about gender and racial inequality in the film industry to provide a theoretical and empirical foundation for our analysis and contextualize our findings. These sources grounded our project in quantitative analysis and critical theory, emphasizing how creative visibility is shaped by systemic power structures. More information about our sources can be found in our annotated bibliography.
Processing our Data
The sources we used for this project were already well-established within film and media scholarship, but we still engaged in careful selection and organization to ensure that our evidence aligned with our research questions. We pulled from peer-reviewed studies, industry reports, nonprofit datasets, and qualitative interviews, and then synthesized this information using digital tools such as Google Sheets and online text-analysis platforms. Each tool was chosen based on team members’ familiarity and the type of data we were working with: some of us were comfortable analyzing statistical reports, while others focused on interpreting qualitative themes or organizing industry patterns. Throughout the process, we were intentional about matching our tools to the form of the evidence so that our interpretations remained accurate and consistent with our overall argument.
To create visual components for our project, we used tools like Tableau and basic data-chart functions to display trends in representation, disparities in leadership positions, and differences in funding across projects led by men versus women. We selected these tools based on what each one offered: Tableau allowed for clean, accessible infographic-style visuals; Google sheets supported interactive charts; and simple spreadsheet graphs were effective for clearly representing numerical gaps without over-complicating the data. Despite the variety of tools, we maintained a consistent visual language that emphasized clarity, accessibility, and alignment with our narrative about structural inequality.
We also used Timeline.js to highlight the history of gender inequality in the film industry. This tool allowed us to integrate visuals, key events, and major policy shifts into an interactive timeline that made historical patterns more engaging and easier to understand. By combining quantitative data, qualitative scholarship, and digital storytelling, our project presents a clear, multifaceted view of the systemic forces shaping women’s experiences in film.
Presenting our Narrative
For our project’s digital presentation, we used WordPress to create the website. We selected a light layout with dark text and kept it simple to create strong contrast and ensure that our visuals—such as charts, infographics, and timeline elements—stood out clearly. Since many of our graphics used lighter backgrounds, this design choice helped maintain readability across devices. In addition, we formatted all section headers using proper HTML heading tags rather than bold styling so assistive technologies could accurately navigate the structure of the page.
Although the site was built in WordPress, we were able to imbed multiple visualizations and presentations into our project to complete our narrative. This combination of tools allowed us to present our research in a cohesive, accessible, and visually engaging way.