Hollywood's white male writer shortage
White men fell from 45% of new TV and movie writers in 2017 to 25% during the Racial Reckoning in 2021.
Up through Obama’s re-election in 2012, one of my recurrent themes was that the “whole of society” drive for diversity on the job didn’t see to apply to two of the most pro-Obama industries, California’s gold dust twins, Silicon Valley and Hollywood. They were too cool, too important, too rich, and too generous to Obama’s campaigns to be harassed with affirmative action demands like lesser fields in flyover states were.
But roughly about as soon as the last ever Obama campaign donation checks from Palo Alto and Beverly Hills got cashed, things seemed to change. Diversity activists in and out of the government started to get the greenlight to shake down the tech and entertainment industries beginning around 2013.
Two years ago, the Writers Guild of America West issued its Inclusion & Equity Report 2022, which celebrated that able-bodied straight white men were recently getting hammered at getting hired to write TV shows and movies, with white men (of all identity varietals) falling from 45% of new guild members in 2017 to 25% in 2021. (You get into the Guild by getting work.)
But, then again, so what?
After all, what good movies or TV shows have straight white men ever written?
Tables 2 & 5 in the report tell us the following on all active WGA Guild members (not just "new members," apparently):
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"Screen employment":
- 2010: 78.5% White-male.
- 2020: 55.5% White-male.
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"Television":
- 2010: 61% White-male.
- 2020: 34.5% White-male.
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Total numbers of White males implicitly excluded as of 2020 is something like one thousand individuals (assuming little overlap between the 'screen' and 'tv' categories in the Guild).
At least discriminating against white male writers won’t cause operating room deaths or airplanes falling out of the sky.