By Alexa Harrington
T
hursday afternoon, a smiling girl with long brown hair leads her 3D film class in a workshop. With an intense look of concentration and an unbreakable train of thought, she works with her camera. Like an artist creating a masterpiece, Hannah Whisenant’s focus cannot be broken, except, of course, when she laughs at something particularly amusing. Early Saturday evening, a typical student film crew shoots a class project in a hot, cramped West Campus apartment. The female leader of the crew lugs around a cumbersome 35mm camera, which is completely disproportionate to the size of the apartment and to the size of the woman carrying it. When she gives orders to the male technicians, this leader, the tall and slender Nikki Dengel embodies grace and femininity while asserting dominance. It wasn’t until she watched the University of Texas at Austin School of Communication graduation ceremony that Dengel realized the Radio-Television-Film (RTF) major is a fairly balanced major between men and women. “I’ve never had better than a 5:1 ratio [of men to women] in class, so I always kind of assumed that there are more men in RTF,” Dengel says.
In 2013, women accounted for only 16 percent of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers and editors, according to The Celluloid Ceiling, a study of women’s behind-the-scenes employment in film, conducted by The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. If the number of men and women in RTF is about even, then where are all of the women in film going after they graduate from college? “I think that sometimes girls are intimidated by the guys being more technical, so they feel less comfortable in [technical] classes, and then they don’t end up learning those skills, and then they don’t pursue it,” Whisenant says. “Guys typically get into production, camera and gripping and gaffing stuff, and there are a lot of opportunities for that.” It’s these technical jobs that act as a shoe-in to the industry. If women are not learning these technical skills in school, it is easy to see how making their way into the film industry would be difficult. At the same time, women are also more likely to forgo their careers in pursuit of a family. There are multiple factors that affect women’s involvement int he film industry.