Female stars are often the biggest draw in Bollywood – an industry still dominated by men.
Tired of being sidelined, the women are banding together to voice their woes.
“We would have at least 80-90 people on a set but only three or four of them women,” said film producer Petrina D’Rozario, founder and president of Women In Film And Television, India, a non-profit advocacy group based in Mumbai – the heart of the country’s film industry.
“We would also bump into each other and say, ‘Oh, my God. Why can’t we get a toilet?’”
Besides the dearth of toilets, the women also face the lack of childcare facilities, lower pay and late-night shifts that disregard their personal safety.
These are among the issues that have driven D’Rozario and other women working in India’s huge film industry to form their own groups outside the traditional trade union framework to lobby on issues related to working conditions and gender-related inequalities.
“In my mind, most of the film fraternity is a boys’ club,” said Fowzia Fathima, cinematographer and founding member of the Indian Women Cinematographers’ Collective.
While the groups lack the bargaining power of a traditional union, they provide a forum for women to find work, seek advice on workplace harassment and share professional tips and industry news.
“It’s a safe space to discuss our concerns, which is needed until things can be discussed in the open,” said Fathima.
In India’s Rs2.1 trillion ($340 billion)huge movie business, men outnumber women in Bollywood film crews by five to two, according to research by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.
In Hollywood, the ratio is similar, with about a third of key behind-the-scenes crew jobs occupied by women.
India’s film industry is the world’s most prolific, churning out about 2,000 films each year and employing all kinds of artists. But women in Bollywood struggle to get hired, said University of Wisconsin-Madison academic Darshana Sreedhar Mini who studies labour organisation in the Indian film industry.
Part of the imbalance is due to women’s unequal representation in unions and the lack of women in leadership roles.
Women hold only about 10 per cent of senior management roles on set, according to a 2022 industry report by media consulting group Ormax Media and streaming platform Amazon Prime Video.
“Many organisations have one or two women and the overall picture remains very bleak,” said Ms Sreedhar, adding that the biggest concern is the industry’s pay gap. And female crew members continue to face other challenges, such as difficulty in getting hired and being made to feel unwelcome on set, especially in technical roles.
D’Rozario said her group has worked with others in helping women get scholarships, internships and networking opportunities.
“We went through so much fire in trying to raise funds to make things happen,” she added, saying that the payoff has been worth the effort, seeing female filmmakers blossom in the industry.
“There is an iceberg of issues, we are touching just the tip.”
Thomson Reuters Foundation
