What Percentage of Movies Are Written by Women Over 40?

A few months ago, Elizabeth Kaiden and Nitza Wilon from The Writers Lab approached me with a simple question: “What percentage of movies are written by women over the age of 40?”

The Writers Lab is an organization set up specifically to nurture the talent of female screenwriters over the age of 40, via workshops, labs, and advocacy.  They describe their mission as being to “amplify the voices of women in their prime whose stories have not been told… working toward a new landscape where the female narrative is in equal proportion to the male narrative.”

A fascinating question in support of a good cause — just my kinda thing!

So I turned to the data to see what I could uncover.  I looked at the age and gender of the people behind 38,803 writing credits, across 16,624 live-action fiction feature films.  There is a more detailed methodology in the Notes section at the end of this article.

Let’s examine gender first, then age, and finally, the intersection of the two.

What gender are movie screenwriters?

I’ve written extensively about gender in film over the years, so I won’t go through all the details here. However, we will cover the headline figures, and there are links to deep dives later in the article.

In the 1970s, fewer than one in 10 writers were women, whereas by 2010, that had doubled to one in five. In 2022 it peaked at 25% — which means it’s still under-indexing by half when compared to the general…