Women-Written Films Outperform, Yet Studios Still Back Male Directors

For three decades, the film industry has been slowly, unevenly, and often reluctantly working to increase the presence of women behind the camera and in writers’ rooms. A new analysis of nearly 200,000 movies released between 1994 and 2023 suggests that studios have not only been slow to embrace women as directors and screenwriters, but that in doing so they may have been systematically leaving money on the table. The research, published in Frontiers in Communication, examines the relationship between the gender composition of key creative roles and the financial performance of commercial films, and it arrives at a striking conclusion: films written by women consistently outperform male-only productions on measures of profit and capital efficiency, even as the largest budgets in the industry flow overwhelmingly to films made entirely by men.

The study’s author, Anja Huwiler, a researcher at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, built the analysis on a dataset of almost 200,000 films spanning theatrical and non-theatrical releases across thirty years. From that enormous base, a financial subset of more than 4,200 films was assembled with reliable data on production budgets and worldwide gross revenues. This combination of scale and financial granularity is what allows the study to move beyond the familiar headcount statistics about representation and into territory that studios and investors tend to care about most: whether the money they allocate is being used efficiently and whether certain production configurations deliver measurably better outcomes than others.

The headline finding is unambiguous. Films with a woman screenwriter but no woman director achieved a median profit of approximately 35.9 million dollars, some 34 percent higher than the 26.8 million dollar median of male-only productions, despite operating on broadly similar budgets. The advantage extended to return on investment, a measure of capital efficiency that assesses how much revenue a project generates relative to its cost. Films written but not directed by women posted an ROI of 1.1, about 25 percent higher than the 0.88 recorded for male-only films. The study notes that this ROI measure excludes marketing and distribution costs as well as other revenue sources, meaning it captures the core production economics rather than the full commercial picture.

Perhaps the most economically interesting group consists of films where women occupied both the directing and screenwriting roles. These productions achieved a return on investment roughly equal to that of male-only films while doing so on approximately half the budget. In an industry where capital allocation decisions routinely involve sums in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, a configuration that matches the industry’s standard returns at half the cost would seem, on purely financial grounds, to warrant far more aggressive investment than it currently receives.

Yet that investment has not materialized. The study found that higher-budget films were dominated by male-only creative teams to a degree that increases almost mechanically as budgets rise. Male-only productions accounted for 74.8 percent of films in the top 10 percent of production budgets, 78.6 percent in the top 5 percent, and 88.6 percent in the top 1 percent. Across the entire thirty-year window, not a single film involving a woman director reached the top 1 percent of production budgets. Of the 44 films that did occupy that highest budget tier, 39 were male-only productions. The pattern amounts to what Huwiler describes as a capital allocation puzzle: the projects with the most money behind them are precisely the ones least likely to include women in key creative roles, even though the available financial evidence suggests that inclusion correlates with stronger outcomes.

The financial disparity at the top of the budget distribution is substantial. Among the 44 films in the top 1 percent of budgets, the five that were written but not directed by a woman posted a median profit roughly 113 million dollars higher than male-only films, while carrying slightly lower median budgets. The pattern holds at other levels of the distribution. In the top 5 percent of budgets, films with a woman screenwriter but no woman director achieved a median profit of 556 million dollars, about 86 million dollars above the male-only median. In the top 10 percent of budgets, the corresponding figure was around 452 million dollars, roughly 134 million dollars more than productions made entirely by men. These are not marginal differences confined to small independent features; they appear, and in absolute terms widen, at the commercial tiers where studio decision-making matters most.

Against these financial signals, the pace of demographic change in the industry looks glacial. The share of films crediting at least one woman as a director or screenwriter rose from 21.5 percent in 1994 to 29.4 percent in 2023. After nearly three decades, fewer than one in three films included a woman in either of these two central creative roles. Notably, the study found that the #MeToo movement, which prompted intense public scrutiny of gender inequity in Hollywood beginning in 2017, did not produce a lasting acceleration in the rate of growth. Women’s participation continued to rise in the period afterward, but the underlying trajectory did not bend in any statistically meaningful way, suggesting that heightened awareness alone has been insufficient to shift the industry’s allocation of creative opportunities.

The study did not experimentally test the mechanisms driving the mismatch, and Huwiler is careful to frame the possible explanations as drawn from prior research rather than demonstrated within her own dataset. The leading hypothesis concerns how decision-makers respond to uncertainty. Film financing is an extremely uncertain enterprise, with outcomes highly variable and success difficult to predict in advance. Under such conditions, people responsible for greenlighting and staffing projects tend to avoid risk and loss, gravitating toward familiar collaborators and established ways of working. That instinct, Huwiler points out, can reinforce the status quo even when the financial evidence points elsewhere. Decision-makers may not be acting irrationally at the level of any single hiring choice, but the aggregate effect of thousands of risk-averse, familiarity-seeking decisions is a system that underallocates resources to a set of productions that, on average, perform better.

Achieving durable change, she suggests, may therefore require changing how people get their chance in the first place, rather than relying on individual executives to spontaneously take chances. One possibility she raises is to make looking beyond familiar professional circles a normal, systematic part of staffing and budgeting decisions, embedding the practice into hiring, greenlighting, and budgeting routines rather than leaving it to the discretion of any single decision-maker. In other words, the remedy implied by the data is procedural rather than aspirational: build the consideration of a wider talent pool into the machinery of studio operations so that the default path no longer reproduces the existing distribution of opportunity.

The study is candid about its limitations. The financial subset represented predominantly U.S. theatrical releases, which means the profitability findings should be read with that market context in mind. Some subgroups, particularly women directors, were small in number, making certain findings descriptive rather than inferential. Gender classification across the full dataset was inferred from first names, an approach that may undercount women from certain backgrounds and introduce noise into the categorization. Even with these caveats, Huwiler argues that the study’s value lies in its deliberate choice of lens. Rather than framing the underrepresentation of women solely as a matter of representation, the analysis evaluates it as a question of financial performance, asking whether studios’ investment decisions are consistent with the outcomes they observe. The results suggest they are not, providing a concrete, quantifiable reason for studios and investors to scrutinize how their hiring, greenlighting, and budgeting practices distribute both money and opportunity across the creative talent pool.

Subject of Research: The underrepresentation of women directors and screenwriters in commercial film and its impact on studio financial performance.

Article Title: Films written by women make studios the most money, but budget goes to male filmmakers

Article References: Films written by women make studios the most money, but budget goes to male filmmakers. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: women screenwriters, women directors, film industry, return on investment, capital allocation, gender inequality, Hollywood, film budgets, median profit, box office, hiring practices, Frontiers in Communication