Did the Patriarchy Snub Barbie?

Oscars nominations were announced this week, and two glaring omissions dominated the cultural response. The women at the helm of Barbie, Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig, were left out of the Best Actress and Best Director races, respectively. Gerwig’s snub struck a particularly raw chord, as many echoed actress America Ferrera’s belief that Gerwig had done “just about everything that a director could do to deserve it.”

Barbie received eight nods in total, including Ferrera and Ryan Gosling in supporting acting categories, but observers were quick to recognize the irony:

Was Greta Gerwig’s gender a factor, explicit or implicit, in the Best Director snub? Here’s what we know:

Women directors have faced a 100-year uphill battle

From Time’s Up to #OscarsSoWhite, Hollywood has been skewered in recent years for its systemic discrimination – and directors are no exception. The statistics are more dismal than Marvel’s latest box office stats:

• Of the 116 directors involved in 2023’s 100 highest grossing films, 12% were women.

• Out of 601 total films nominated for Best Picture, just 21 have been directed by a woman (including this year’s Barbie nomination). 

• Just seven women have ever been nominated for Best Director, and only three have won. 

• The last five years have seen little progress. 2018 brought a spike in women directors following the #MeToo movement, jumping from 4% to 10% of all films being directed by a woman, but the number hasn’t grown significantly since then.

Here’s a plot twist none of us saw coming: it wasn’t always this way. In fact, 100 years ago, in the silent film era of the 1920s, women directors dominated the industry. There were at least 57 women working as directors in the decade, and they were considered “equal to, if not better than, their male colleagues.” 

This dynamic changed with the introduction of sound, a massive shift for film that Wall Street investors flocked to support. And with Wall Street came the financial industry’s vertical integration, centralization, and, well, men. Women were edged out and remained largely absent in the director’s chair until the 1970s, when the feminist movement began (ever so slowly) to loosen the male grip on Hollywood.

But by then, precedent had been set and the gender imbalance was embedded. Even as a growing number of women pursued directing, they faced the age-old challenges of breaking into a male-dominated profession:

• People “recruit in their own image.” Unconscious bias often leads like to hire like, and in an industry where networking and personal relationships matter as much as qualifications, male mentors and producers have outsized power to gate-keep the positions they offer.

• Women have few role models to pave the way. The role of director has become so closely associated with men that, until recently, women haven’t considered it as a possibility for them.

• Like many industries, gender stereotypes abound in Hollywood. One study identified a widespread false perception that women are less interested in directing blockbuster films. Similarly, over 70% of women said their authority had been questioned in a directing role.

But other factors may be working against Barbie 

Mainstream movies have always struggled in the Best Director category. Previous surprising exclusions include Ben Affleck for Argo and Bradley Cooper for A Star is Born. Even Christopher Nolan himself, now the front-runner for the Best Director win with Oppenheimer, was once snubbed from the category with the widely popular hit, The Dark Knight.

The Best Director nod is more competitive, with only five nominees rather than 10 for Best Picture. And while the Best Picture winner is selected by the entire academy, the director’s award is chosen by a much smaller subset of members. Barbie’s lack of recognition from this group, who have been described as “arty” and “highbrow,” tracks with their preference for critical darlings over box office hits. It’s possible that any director of a mainstream comedy would have faced the same challenge as Gerwig.

Could the fact that the director’s branch is three quarters male have anything to do with it? Well, at least *one woman* received a Best Director nomination this year…

So what can we conclude?

Is Gerwig’s omission sexism or simply the nature of the category? It’s a nuanced, multi-layered question, and the answer likely lies somewhere in the middle. But regardless, it’s clear that more work is needed to overcome the embedded biases and stereotypes that have kept women directors sidelined in Hollywood (to learn about the efforts taking place to increase women’s representation in the director’s chair, this article is a great place to start).

In the meantime, I’ll be rooting for a Gerwig win in Best Adapted Screenplay.