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LA-based, FEMALE cinematographer comfortable shooting 16mm


Alexander Boyd

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8 hours ago, Dom Jaeger said:

What measures have been put in place in this instance?

We've had two mentioned in this very thread (this and this) which are women-only organisations. It is very easy to find lots of examples of women being afforded special treatment in organisations, press coverage and other circumstances (this, this, this, this, this) even within our fairly small industry, which represents a double standard and risks all of the problems I've described in this thread.

I should make it clear that I don't necessarily blame anyone, male or female, for taking the breaks they can get, and I have known women in the camera department who have benefited from this sort of thing, but I can't approve of it in general.

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Those websites listing female DPs are not breaking anti-discrimination laws

Possibly they aren't, but that doesn't make it fair, reasonable, or a good idea.

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If our indigenous population is vastly over-represented in prisons, do we simply shrug and decide that they must be more prone to criminal behaviour or do we ask ourselves if other factors are at play?

I'd avoided making reference to this as it feels like a low blow, but men in general are imprisoned at much higher rates than women, and nobody's asking awkward questions about that (well, it's been raised, but it's hardly a mainstream narrative). This implies we are quite happy to work on the basis that certain groups are more prone to criminal behaviour than others, which we really shouldn't in any circumstances whatsoever, since in the context of criminal justice it runs into the issue of applying statistics to the individual.

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There are any number of studies (not to mention news reports) that show that discrimination is alive and well in 2019

I'm not sure I'd want to base a considered response to perceived prejudice on the popular press, but if you know of any studies into the representation of women in the technical roles of film and television which have been published in a respectable, peer-reviewed journal, that's exactly the sort of information I've suggested we need. I suspect there aren't many on the basis that it has become acceptable to take the idea the problem exists on a specific scale as a prerequisite, which is exactly the sort of assumption I'm arguing against.

Comparing this to slavery or universal suffrage is a false equivalency. There is no question that the issue of voting rights, pre-suffrage, affected all women, but it wasn't necessary to determine who would vote in order to ensure that everyone could vote, which satisfied the moral case. Conversely, and to drag this discussion back on topic, the various desires of various groups as regards film and television camerawork are far from obvious. With such an information vacuum we are left with the blank-cheque mentality to what's perceived as corrective action as has been displayed in this thread, and I think I've already laboured the point sufficiently as to the dangers that creates.

P

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On 12/16/2019 at 7:56 AM, Dom Jaeger said:

but it still shocks me that only last year we had the first female nomination for a cinematography Oscar in the history of the Academy. Not even a win, just a nomination! 

So what are you saying the first woman to be nominated for best cinematography should win by default because she's the first one?

R,

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1 hour ago, Richard Boddington said:

So what are you saying the first woman to be nominated for best cinematography should win by default because she's the first one?

R,

No of course not. I meant I was shocked that in the history of the Oscars there had never been a woman even nominated for cinematography before, which is a much larger pool than winners. 

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15 hours ago, Richard Boddington said:

Why do you think that is?

R,

I'm certainly not an expert Richard, but maybe it's as complicated a question as why in 2019 there is still a large pay disparity between men and women for doing the same job with the same qualifications. Here in Australia the gender pay gap sits at nearly 18%. What could be the reasons for that? Why do the top 10 female actors earn a third as much as the top 10 male actors, even though the top 3 box-office films of 2017 centred around a female lead?

If you're genuinely  interested, this paper released by Screen Australia goes into some of the barriers women face in the film and TV industry:

https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/f20beab8-81cc-4499-92e9-02afba18c438/Gender-Matters-Women-in-the

See pages 7 and 8.

You could ask why it is that even though women buy half of all movie tickets in the US, male actors have more than twice as much dialogue and only 12% of films have a cast that is evenly balanced with men and women. Are stories about men just more interesting, or could there be some systemic bias happening? Check out this infographic for more interesting stats:

https://www.nyfa.edu/film-school-blog/gender-inequality-in-film-infographic-updated-in-2018/

For the sake of Phil's request for peer-reviewed studies, from Wikipedia:

 "A 2015 meta-analysis of studies of experimental studies of gender in hiring found that "men were preferred for male-dominated jobs (i.e., gender-role congruity bias), whereas no strong preference for either gender was found for female-dominated or integrated jobs".[33] A 2018 audit study found that high-achieving men are called back more frequently by employers than equally high-achieving women (at a rate of nearly 2-to-1).[34] " The studies are from the Journal of Applied Psychology and the American Sociological Review.

As I've said before, systemic bias doesn't have to be about blatant sexism or men holding women back. It can be as simple as the fact that women need to take time out of the workforce to have children, and that can set back a career that depends on contacts and constant availability. There is usually no maternity leave or childcare on a film set. Whether factors like that seem unfair can depend on your perspective I guess.

Cinematography is often overlooked in these studies compared to the other main creative roles such as writers, directors and producers, and the number of women choosing it as a career is lower than those other roles, so there are no easy answers. But looking at all those statistics I very much doubt it just comes down to women not being interested or good at it.

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On 12/18/2019 at 12:16 AM, Dom Jaeger said:

 there is still a large pay disparity between men and women for doing the same job with the same qualifications. Here in Australia the gender pay gap sits at nearly 18%. 

It is already illegal for people to be paid different rates on the basis of gender in most jurisdictions, if anyone found that was happening they'd have my full support, and the claims that women are somehow cheaper to hire than men are absurd; in that case, nobody would ever hire a man for any job.

I'm not familiar with the figures specifically for Australia, but in general the gender pay gap is often terribly misinterpreted. Figures in the teens (in the UK it's 17.8% for all employees) usually represent a straightforward comparison of whole-life earnings with no control for any confounding factor, which tends not to be a measure not so much of direct discrimination, but of people's freely-made choices. The inclusion of historical data also muddies the waters terribly.

To give an example, it is essentially impossible to be both a parent, particularly a full-time parent (of either gender) and a full-time captain of industry. Childrearing is a choice which has consequences, some of which are financial. As an aside, in my view, the fact that more women than men end up being full-time carers is a matter to be decided by the people involved in the relationship.

In the end, as operating adults we are required to decide what we're going to do with our lives. Hard choices may be involved; I know there were for me, and I have absolutely no paternal instincts whatsoever. I would support anyone in pursuing any reasonable goal but it is not reasonable to demand everything, all at once, with the expectation that it's everyone else's problem to make it happen.

After controlling for reasonable factors, the disparity in pay is generally much smaller. Forensic statisticians generally do find some small residual, often called the "unexplained pay gap" which is often around 5-6% in advanced economies and isn't really explainable by anything other than prejudice. The gender pay gap strictly in the sense it is usually discussed is nowhere near 18%, it's about 6%.

It's also worth bearing in mind that it's extremely difficult to make like-for-like comparisons in fields such as cinematography where nuances of one person's experience over another are almost infinitely complex. If I want a cinematographer to shoot a sci-fi and the choice is a man who's shot ten costume dramas and a woman who's shot ten sci fis, then it would be reasonable to offer the woman more money, even though they've both shot the same number of movies, because her experience is more relevant. This is extremely difficult to rationalise statistically.

Thankfully, nobody's saying we should arbitrarily pay women more to address all this, although discriminatory hiring practices are followed in some companies, which beckon all of the problems of applying statistics to the individual, low expectations, and the assumption of inadequacy that we've already discussed.

P

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It's a plain fact of history that a great deal of journalism and certain areas of academia have both become greatly biased. There are a lot of claims being made that are deceptive. "...test everything; hold fast what is good."

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