Women directors are remain scarce in Hollywood. This mentorship program aims to change that

Six years ago, Ally Pankiw got her first big TV breakthrough: She directed the first season of the Netflix comedy-drama “Feel Good.”

But getting there was a slog. She recalls being told repeatedly that she couldn’t land such jobs without first having directing experience in TV, a catch-22 situation shared by many women and people of color trying to break into the business.

Frustrated by that common refrain and motivated to push back against Hollywood’s larger diversity problem, Pankiw decided to take action.

She started to bring mentees to her sets, first paying them on commercial shoots from her own rate, then eventually asking film and TV productions to pay them as part of the budget. The idea was for those aspiring directors to shadow her on set and get that firsthand knowledge about an industry that is so often out of reach.

Pankiw’s individual efforts have now grown into Breadcrumbs, a mentorship program she formally launched late last year that helps up-and-coming women and nonbinary directors get access to paid, credited shadowing opportunities on film, TV and commercial sets.

So far, she said, about 25 directors and production companies have signed a pledge to commit to these paid mentorship opportunities, including “Freakier Friday” director Nisha Ganatra and Lilly Wachowski of “The Matrix” franchise.

“We get told the myth that we as female directors or diverse directors are competing against each other for a very small amount of jobs,” said Pankiw, 39, who grew up outside of Edmonton, Canada, and now splits time between Los Angeles and Toronto. “We’re actually not each other’s competition. We need to make our piece of our pie as big as possible. And I think we’ve got to help each other get there.”

Pankiw’s efforts come as Hollywood has seen a further backslide in women’s employment.

As my colleague Meg James recently wrote, women made up just 13% of the directors working on the top 250 films last year, down from 16% in 2024, according to a study from San Diego State.

That’s even more sobering when you consider the bigger picture.

Martha Lauzen, the study’s author and founder of the university’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, has been tracking women’s employment as directors on the top-grossing Hollywood films for 28 years. During that period, she said, there has been little improvement.

In 1998, women made up 9% of directors, compared with last year’s 13%, marking a difference of just 4 percentage points in nearly three decades, she said.

Despite the success of such prominent directors and producers as Kathryn Bigelow, Ava DuVernay and Chloe Zhao, women remain vastly underrepresented behind the camera.

“In looking at the numbers, I can only surmise that the major film studios do not view women’s underemployment as directors or in any of the other roles I track, including as editors, cinematographers, writers, or composers, as a problem,” Lauzen wrote in an email. “If you don’t view something like severe gender inequality to be problematic, you’re not going to do anything significant to change it.”

For a time, there was some momentum on this issue.

In 2015, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission started to investigate alleged gender discrimination in Hollywood, after a request from the American Civil Liberties Union. But the review failed to get traction. Shortly after, President Trump came into office, and political attitudes toward the topic changed.

There was also a burst of promises in the wake of the #MeToo movement to improve gender parity in Hollywood.

One of the biggest and most resounding commitments was the industry-wide push to generate candidate lists that were 50% women. For a number of years, that seemed to be happening.

But as the industry faced an increasing number of headwinds, including the pandemic, the dual writers’ and actors’ strikes in 2023 and studio spending cutbacks, those efforts dwindled.

Then came Trump’s call for the end of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which pushed some of these initiatives underground as companies became less vocal about DEI commitments.

The lagging percentage of women film directors last year is a clear sign that the industry is going backward, said Kirsten Schaffer, chief executive of WIF, which advocates for women in Hollywood. The group is supporting Pankiw’s Breadcrumbs initiative along with talent agency WME. The agency, which represents Pankiw, also contributed seed funding to WIF for the program’s infrastructure, as well as legal language for mentorship inclusion negotiations.

“There’s no lack of talent,” Schaffer said. “It really is lack of opportunity.”

That’s where Pankiw hopes Breadcrumbs can help.

Once a director, producer, studio or production company signs on to the pledge, they’re given resources and contract language that helps normalize the inclusion of a paid mentorship on sets. (The mentees’ pay is at least the rate of a production assistant.)

Directors currently signed onto the pledge can be matched with vetted options for potential mentees from Breadcrumbs’ internal databases, developed with industry partnerships.

By showing them what these sets are like and how directors solve problems on the fly, Pankiw hopes mentees will be a little more fearless as they pursue their careers.

“I really hope it helps instill confidence in the people that join these sets and shadow,” said Pankiw, who has directed episodes of the Elle Fanning-led “The Great,” sci-fi series “Black Mirror” and the 2023 film “I Used to Be Funny.” “No one knows what they’re doing as they take the next step in their career, as they try something new. Everyone is learning on each new set.”

Stuff We Wrote

Number of the week

The 83rd Golden Globes Awards saw a ratings setback this year with average viewership of 8.66 million, a 7% drop compared with the previous year, according to Nielsen data.

The data, which include livestreaming figures, mark the second straight audience decline for the awards ceremony, which was telecast on CBS. Last year, 9.2 million viewers watched the Globes.

It’s true that awards shows no longer bring in the massive ratings they once did, a consequence of changing habits among viewers, who have turned to social media to watch clips of acceptance speeches and viral moments.

Finally …

My colleague Todd Martens writes about Disneyland’s pivot toward the original “Star Wars” characters and classic John Williams’ score in its Galaxy’s Edge and what that says about the themed land’s ambitions.