Camera Still “Male”, Editing No Longer “Female”

With an eye to International Women’s Day on 8 March, this year’s edition of the mdw’s “Gender Screening” event zeroed in on gender ratios in film—both in training and in concrete film productions. This took place in keeping with the concept of previous Gender Screening formats, whose purpose has been to take a data-driven closer look at various mdw domains with respect to the dimension of gender, screening student data to ascertain shares of women and men in the interest of rendering visible and discussable the current (binary¹) gender ratios in instrumental studies and education degree programmes as well as in selected other performing arts programmes. (On this, see the statistics published annually by the Working Group on Equal Opportunities as part of its report entitled Geschlechterverteilungen an der mdw.)

What can we glean from the data on how Film Academy Vienna student gender ratios have developed?

With support from the mdw Archive, the mdw’s Administrative Department of Equality, Gender and Diversity (GGD) pursued a historically oriented data gathering project that extended from the mdw film school’s beginnings in 1952 to the present day². The data show that the five film degree programmes now offered—Screenplay Writing and Dramaturgy, Camera Technology and Cinematography, Editing, Production, and Directing—now feature more equal gender ratios than was formerly the case. Even so, we do see unequal ratios in the MA programmes, with the excess of males being most significant in the Directing MA programme. Viewed through a historical lens, it’s striking how it took until the 1970s for the first women to appear in the Camera Technology programme and how women were admitted to the Directing programme only in isolated cases. Developments have been entirely different where Editing is concerned: once known as a typical “women’s” discipline, it has since shifted toward more equal participation in terms of gender over the course of film’s digitisation.

Fix the numbers!

“Gender Screening Film. Perspektiven für gender- und diversitätsgerechtes Filmschaffen. Gespräch und Filmscreening zum Internationalen Frauen*tag” [Gender Screening – Film. Prospects for Gender- and Diversity-Sensitive Filmmaking. Discussion and Film Screening in Observance of International Women’s Day] was the title of an event conceived by the GGD in cooperation with Film Academy Vienna that took place at the Viennese cinema Admiralkino on 13 March 2025. After a panel discussion on gender ratios in film, to be mentioned in more detail below, this event featured a screening of two films made with funding from Film Academy Vienna’s own Gender/Queer/Diversity Call along with post-screening discussions, all of which was curated and moderated by Barbara Wolfram and Bianca Rauch.

There was also a discussion on prospects for gender- and diversity-sensitive filmmaking between Barbara Albert (directing professor and deputy head of Film Academy Vienna), Iris Zappe-Heller (deputy director of the Austrian Film Institute [ÖFI]), and Andrea Ellmeier (long-time head of the GGD) with moderation by veteran film curator Djamila Grandits. The basis for this conversation was the participants’ reading of the data from the mdw’s film (training) programme presented by the GGD together with an analysis of the Film Gender Report commissioned and published by the ÖFI. Regarding the data gathered at the mdw, Ellmeier stated: “A pleasing conclusion we can draw from a look at the mdw data is that film studies enrolment by men and by women—excluding certain MA programmes, which feature markedly elevated shares of men—is becoming more equal,” even if this does not permit the conclusion that things look similar in the professional film world. There, what predominates is mostly still a quite classically stereotypical gender distribution (see the various editions of the Film Gender Report). “The Austrian film industry,” reads the Film Gender Report, “still has marked gender differentiation”—meaning that there exist departments (these being the various domains of a given film’s production) that remain decidedly “male” and “female”. “Women continue to be underrepresented in technical departments such as lighting (8 %), film sound (14 %) and camera (20 %) in addition to the powerful core departments of production (35 %), script (41 %) and directing (43 %).” (Third edition of the Film Gender Report, 2024, p. 4) Despite these facts, she hastened to emphasise that the share of women has risen in all departments across the Austrian film industry—which can be attributed above all to women’s promotion measures implemented by the ÖFI such as the “Gender Incentive” (a € 30,000 production subsidy that rewards an elevated share of women in leading positions) as well as gender-related budgeting. This proves yet again, according to Zappe-Heller, that dedicated women’s promotion measures are by no means obsolete but in fact absolutely necessary in order to effect sustained structural changes in the film industry. Barbara Albert likewise hailed these measures as political guidance mechanisms and emphasised the importance of meaningful facts and figures that enable evidence-based work, especially in the context of admissions processes. From Andrea Ellmeier came the suggestion that public arts and cultural funding bodies should promote and/or demand adoption of the ÖFI’s women’s promotion measures in other artistic fields as a best-practice example. A conspicuous area remains that of cinematography, where the conclusion is: “Still too few woman cinematographers! Men in particular work primarily with male cinematographers.” (Third Gender Film Report, 2024, p. 4) One reason for this is the still terrifyingly low share of women—20 %—among those working in cinematography. It follows that the considerably higher percentages of women in the Film Academy’s cinematography BA and MA programmes have yet to impact actual film productions. In order for the field of film to become fairer in terms of gender and diversity, further courageous political efforts will hence be necessary along with anti-discriminatory awareness and actions at the film-related institutions themselves—and to this end, Film Academy Vienna can make a central contribution with dedicated gender equality-focused policies and strategies.

1. It is unfortunately still not possible to represent inter*, trans, and non-binary persons on the basis of currently available data: this is due to a challenging and as yet unresolved problem of data collection and portrayal that is well known in the field of statistics.
2. At the mdw, digitised data is available only from 1984 onward.