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Justice for Men & Boys 
““It’s lovely to work with an amazing group of women,” Putt said when asked about the prevalence of women in leadership roles at Bafta, including its CEO.” So as usual the women are “amazing” and the body is purely administrative rather than actually creates anything! This then goes on to describe the various ways it goes about doing the opposite of creating “a level playing field” by quotas, instructions to judging panels and deliberate exclusion of works created by men! Intriguingly it then gives figures that show ethnic minorities are in fact overrepresented (if the metric is the proportion of the GB population).
And of course she hits the nail on the head “The talent agent and producer, who took over as chair of Bafta in 2023, said the low representation of women in the awards’ most prestigious categories was reflective of a lack of access to and retention in an industry that has become increasingly precarious.” In reality the creative part of the film industry (actually making movies) is not some salaried sinecure with easy “family friendly” hours and rewards for paper qualifications (hence women crowd into the civil service and other administrative roles) it is as she describes much more “precarious” with people employed to do a job of work successfully and do so time after time to build a reputation as reliably contributing to successful projects, which often require massive financial investment and thence huge risk to those producing films. While only giving contracts for the duration of the project. Surprise surprise the sex known to take risks and prioritise their work ( as the feminists trumpet frequently) sticks with this precarious situation, while women leave (for instance to work for a 9 to 5 desk job in Bafta).
In effect the only solution to this terrible “problem” would be to reproduce the Soviet System of film making as a branch of the Civil service. Then there’d be plenty of leave, four day weeks and “office hours” WFH and time off for “brain fog” and so on. In a very real sense women show common sense in seeking and staying in occupations that give, security, easy access to time off, regular hours, little risk and which can be easily fitted into “work life balance”. Hence it is that in Scandinavia and the richer countries of western Europe affluence has increased the “gender segregation” of occupations with women hugely overrepresented in the public sector and big corporations administration.
However what will happen id Bafta will have to continue to do the opposite of equality “announced that half of those longlisted for best director must be women. The voting system was also changed, with a list of 15 films that committee members must watch, to avoid a smaller selection dominating the list.” If only 14% of films are directed by women then clearly male directors work is being discriminated against by a 50/50 quota and obviously the standard for inclusion is much much lower for women. But of course out there in the real world (rather than Bafta’s luvvy board) films need to have audiences and generate income and profit (apart perhaps from the BBC) rather than approval of female administrators at Bafta.
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Thanks Nigel, great points!
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