A few in the film world

A woman is more likely to hold a seat on a Fortune 500 company board (15 per cent), serve as a member of the clergy (15 per cent) or work as an aerospace engineer (10 per cent) than she is to direct a Hollywood movie (7 per cent).

A year after Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Oscar for best director for The Hurt Locker, a new study indicates that the share of top behind-the-scenes positions held by women in Hollywood remains stagnant at low levels.

Women held 16 per cent of key jobs such as director and producer on the top 250 films of 2010 (as measured by domestic box-office receipts), according to the Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. That's steady from the 2009 figures and about the same level as in 1998, when the centre launched its Celluloid Ceiling report.

"People were talking about the Bigelow effect," said Martha Lauzen, executive director of the centre. "It affected her career but we're not at a point where the halo effect reaches out to others."

In 2010, women were most likely to work in the romantic comedy, documentary and romantic drama genres and least likely to work in the horror, action and comedy genres, according to the study. One reason that the number of women working in film hasn't increased more quickly may be the fee-for-hire system used to staff movies, said Melissa Silverstein, co-founder of the Athena Film Festival, which opened recently in New York City with the theme of celebrating women's leadership in film.

"Directors, writers — they're technically not employees of the movie studios," Silverstein said. "So the studios keep no statistics, except of course for counting box office." And without statistics, there's no urgency to change, Silverstein said.

"If this were a Fortune 500 company and they looked at these statistics, they would have a diversity committee working on this immediately," she said. "How could you have a company in the 21st century and less than 10 per cent of its leaders are women?"

The film category where women are scarcest is cinematography; women shot just 2 per cent of films in the study. "We thought it would get a lot easier for women," said Nancy Schreiber, who shot the Helen Hunt and Liev Schreiber movie Every Day.

Being a rarity, Schreiber said, adds extra stress to an already pressured career path. "As a cinematographer, you're running the set, the camera, grip, electrical departments. We cannot make mistakes because it reflects on every other woman."

Women's under-representation on film sets has implications beyond the vocational, according to Lauzen.

"Movies make a difference in how we see the world and how we see certain groups of people. These are the architects of our culture."