How to make it in Hollywood if you’re a woman: four female professionals tell how industry insiders helped their careers

Writing, cinematography, producing and special effects are notoriously difficult fields to get into in Hollywood if you are a woman

Four female creatives, who each had an industry internship at the Television Academy Foundation, talk about how they bucked the trend

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Kaitlyn Yang on the set of Polaris Primetime. Her visual effects firm, Alpha Studios, is doing well in Hollywood, despite it being a male-dominated industry. Photo: AP

Published: 10:15pm, 11 Oct 2020Updated: 10:15pm, 11 Oct 2020

Kaitlyn Yang knows it’s rare for women to work in visual effects but wanted to find out just how much company she has.

She devised an informal survey earlier this year, and painstakingly searched 24,000 LinkedIn entries for female visual effects supervisors in North America. Her tally: 30.

“So you do the maths,” she says of the tiny percentage that it represents. Her findings tally with in-depth research showing women are under-represented in behind-the-camera positions, including writing, directing and producing, despite recent progress.

A study of the 250 top-grossing films in 2019 by San Diego State University’s Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film found that women comprise six per cent of visual effects supervisors, five per cent of cinematographers and 19 per cent of writers. A centre report on last season’s TV shows found similar patterns.

Layne Eskridge (centre), a former creative executive at Apple TV, takes part in the Television Academy Foundation’s Intern Speaker Series events in Los Angeles. Photo: AP

Yang, whose perseverance led to the creation of her own firm, Alpha Studios, is among those succeeding in Hollywood. That is true as well of Layne Eskridge, a former Netflix and Apple TV executive who just launched POV Entertainment; writer Gladys Rodriguez, whose credits include Sons of Anarchy and Vida; and Sandra Valde-Hansen, cinematographer for more than a dozen independent films.