Unspoken Magazine

IN THE

SPOTLIGHT

A man’s World Women and people of colour still don’t have equal footing on set in Vancouver’s film and television productions.

What will it take for the industry to change?

L A U RY N J A M I S O N

40 unspoken

MAY 2022

Karina Jesson was sitting cross-

legged on her roommate’s brown-leather couch when she decided it was time to make the call. There was no way the production company would ask her to perform her role as director of photography at half the normal rate. Or worse, that she would need to work under a mentor, which hadn’t been the case for the last nine months.

But they did. “‘We just think you’re not ready to take your training wheels off yet.’ They said those words to me,” Jesson angrily recalls, as she retells the story four months later from the same brownleather couch. Beside her, a collection of vintage DVDs and VHS movies is aesthetically colour-coded and features some of her all-time favourites: When Harry Met Sally and Stand by Me. “I came to the conclusion that they were trying to take advantage of me because I was young and wanting to DOP,” Jesson says.

The director of that specific project is two years younger than Jesson, and had attended the same film school. They’re also best friends, and he had been pitching for her—and her alone—for this project since the beginning. And yet there were no training wheels suggested for his role. “I know it’s because I’m a girl that they didn’t want my training wheels

off,” Jesson says. “I have male equivalents who have said this would never happen to them.”

Canada’s film and television industry is 100-plus years old, and yet women still struggle for equality on set. In 2021, the Centre for the Study of Women in Television & Film found that women accounted for 25 percent of all key behind-the-scenes roles, including directors, writers, executive producers, producers, editors and cinematographers. While these roles are important to any production, they also make up only one-third of the industry. The remaining two-thirds are comprised of what’s called below-the-line workers, including makeup and production artists, technicians, craftspeople, designers and drivers. In those roles, 34 percent are women, and only 15 percent are visible minorities.

This unequal footing makes the industry an ideal working environment for predatory behaviour. Several studies on sexual harassment in the workplace— including a 2015 study from the World of Labor journal—found that women are more likely to be harassed when they perform male-dominated roles. And as women in the film industry start to fill those male-dominated positions, they’re also more likely to experience harassment.