ReFrame, the initiative launched by the Sundance Institute and Women in Film to promote gender-balanced hiring on film productions, reported a backsliding in hiring of women for key roles among Hollywood’s top films in 2025 in its annual study released Wednesday.
The 2025 ReFrame Report, which analyzes the top 100 films of the year according to IMDb Pro, found that 26 of the films surveyed qualified for the organization’s ReFrame Stamp, which denotes that a film meets the group’s criteria for hiring women, nonbinary and trans people in key roles both in front of and behind the camera. From 2020 to 2024, around 30 films were determined to be gender-balanced productions.
In the director’s chair, the backslide is even more stark. In 2023, 20 films in the IMDb Top 100 were directed by women. In 2025, that count fell to 11 films, the lowest since 2019. In 2024, the surveyed films had 51 central roles going to female actors, including one transgender actor in “Emilia Perez” star Karla Sofia Gascon.
That count fell to 39 roles in 2025, with only seven of those going to women of color, the lowest count in the latter category since 2018. The only position that did not see backsliding in 2025 was producers, as 55 of the top 100 films of 2025 had at least one female producer, the most since 2019 with 56.
“This report’s findings point to a significant divestment in women-led projects — creating a narrowing pipeline of opportunities for women and gender-diverse people across the industry,” said WIF CEO Kirsten Schaffer. “Collectively, we have the power to change that. By making intentional choices guided by the ReFrame Stamp criteria, those with hiring power have a clear path to building a more equitable industry, one production at a time.”
“The ReFrame Stamp was designed as a stepping stone, with moderate measures for substantive inclusion of women, nonbinary and transpeople in key roles in front of and behind the camera to qualify as gender-balanced,” ReFrame founders Cathy Schulman and Keri Putnam added. “This was meant as a floor, not a ceiling, on our way to inclusive hiring. The fact that even this baseline remains a minority achievement is alarming. Instead of raising the bar, we’re now seeing productions falling below it. This is not progress. This is a reversal.”
Among the films that did receive the ReFrame stamp were two films that earned Academy Awards earlier this month: Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet,” which won Best Actress for lead star Jessie Buckley, and Maggie Kang’s “KPop Demon Hunters,” which won Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song. Zhao also became the first woman of color to receive multiple nominations for Best Director, having received the Oscar in 2021 for “Nomadland.”
Other recipients of the ReFrame Stamp include Pixar’s “Elio,” Warner Bros./New Line’s “Final Destination: Bloodlines,” A24’s “Materialists,” Disney’s “Lilo & Stitch,” Marvel Studios’ “Thunderbolts*,” Lionsgate’s “The Housemaid,” Paramount’s “Regretting You” and Universal’s “Wicked: For Good.”
