Oscars Gender Gap Narrows: Women Directed Record 27% of Best Picture Contenders

While Hollywood is still a long way from gender parity, the fight to get more women in the director’s chair hit a milestone this year: For the first time, 27% of the 366 films eligible for this year’s Academy Award for Best Picture had a female director. That’s up from last year, when 23% of eligible films had a woman as director or co-director (79 out of 344 films) — and a marked improvement from five years ago, when only 15% did. “The percentage of female-identified directors in the Oscar race is encouraging,” Kirsten Schaffer, executive director of Women in Film, told TheWrap.