Ephemeral to empowered? International comparison of women’s participation in web series production,2012–2019

Abstract

Women are significantly underrepresented in above-the-line roles in film and television, but anecdotal evidence suggests they are gravitating to web series. To explore this, the authors built the largest known international archive of web series released during 2012–2019 and analysed women’s participation. In the top five web series producing countries in the West, women achieved or approached parity with men in producing, directing and writing, but not cinematography. Do achievements in low-budget, transitory media count for anything? Drawing on ephemeral media scholarship, we discuss the potential of such forms to disturb entrenched patterns of gender discrimination in screen industries worldwide.

Introduction

‘Where are the women?’ is a question that continues to be asked by those studying the production of film and television. The roles of the key creative decision makers in screen industries, those characterized as ‘above-the-line’, such as director, writer or producer remain dominated by men (Wallenberg and Jansson, 2021). These gender imbalances persist even though in many countries women are graduating from film schools and media degrees in equal numbers to men (Banks, 2019; Dooley et al., 2020).

This essay examines web series, an area of online production where anecdotal evidence suggests women are exercising more creative control. We analysed what roles women performed in web series production between 2012 and 2019, a period when the format was taking off globally. The evidence showed that in some countries, women are writing, directing and producing web series at rates that are close to parity with men. Those countries where policy support for gender diversity extends to creative work online are helping women forge more inclusive relations of production in web series. But do achievements in low-budget, transitory media count for anything? In the first half of this essay, we place this research in the context of studies of ephemeral media, where marginalized groups are often overrepresented. Using historical research on ephemeral media, we suggest why contemporary forms such as web series merit attention for their potential to disturb patterns of gender discrimination. By definition, capturing ephemeral media presents a challenge. In the second half of this essay, we explain how we used festival submissions to build an international archive of web series that would permit us to map gender trends and discuss the significance of our findings on women and web series.

Web series as ephemeral media

Ephemeral media are short-lived forms of media content that rarely find admission into official canons of value. Sarah Wasserman defines ephemera as ‘objects destined for disappearance or destruction’ (Wasserman, 2020: 236) that nonetheless often survive in museums and collections. Many of these ephemera are media artefacts, from the tidal wave of printed matter unleashed in the 19th century in the form of cigarette cards, postcards and ‘cartes de visite’ to the billions of tweets, posts, blogs and vlogs circulating in the digital era (Zieger, 2018). Although most such communications are provisional and not intended to endure, scholars have demonstrated that creative media works may also fall into the category of ephemera. In their book Cinephemera (2014), Druick and Cammaer expand the definition of ephemera to include those genres of film that lie outside mainstream commercial systems, from experimental and avant-garde cinema to found footage films, training films, student productions and industrial films, works ‘that are often dismissed as film junk and video trash’ (Druick and Cammaer, 2014: 3). The concept of ephemeral media attests to the way time enters into assessments of cultural value, whether it be the length of a work or its longevity. When Hollywood sought to raise the status of movies, it made them longer, moving from one-reel short films to longer, feature-length narratives likely to attract a better class of audience (Felando, 2015). Works that outlast the times in which they were made are pronounced classics. The longevity of Shakespeare’s work becomes evidence of his timeless genius, although if Shakespeare has survived, this is at least in part because generations of schoolchildren have been required to read him (Smith, 1988). Smith’s observation points to what is socially constructed about the lifespan of cultural works. For something to last, someone has to care enough to preserve it. ‘Ephemera’, Sarah Wasserman writes, ‘[are] things that usually vanish and endure only with care, attention, or representation’ (Wasserman, 2020: 4). The creative work of marginalized groups is more likely to fall into the category of ephemera because it is less likely to receive the resources necessary to assure its preservation. In the case of women’s theatre, for example, ‘the ephemerality of all theatrical performance is exacerbated’ (Fitzsimmons, 1998: 114) because plays by women are less likely to be published or documented. This in turn makes it harder for contemporary women playwrights to build on an existing tradition, or to feel that their work is valued. Of particular relevance to the screen industry is the recent discovery by scholars of Hollywood’s silent era of the central role played by women in the early years of the film industry and how thoroughly their work vanished from the cultural memory and academic histories of cinema (Starr, 1980/2019). According to Karen Mahar, ‘Between 1918 and 1922, women directed forty-four feature-length films, headed more than twenty production companies, wrote hundreds of produced screenplays, became the first agents, and held important positions as editors and heads of scenario and publicity departments’ (Mahar, 2001: 73).

After the arrival of investors from Wall Street and the masculinized business culture they brought with them in the late 1920s, women were rapidly excluded from positions of creative decision-making (Mahar, 2001). The subsequent cultural amnesia about women’s pioneering work in the industry was aided and abetted by journalists, who would refer to director Dorothy Arzner, one of the few female directors able to find work into the 1930s, as the ‘first female director’ in Hollywood. Legend has it that each time they did so, Arzner would write to Lois Weber (director of more than 400 films and at one point the highest paid director in Hollywood) to apologize (Variety, 1974, cited in Mahar, 2001: 75).

‘Reading for what disappears’, as Wasserman (2020) writes, is a feminist undertaking because in attending to things that vanish, one ‘brings into the narrative foreground forms of fleeting community and temporary resistance that have long been the province of women’ (Wasserman, 2020: 36). The growth of interest in ephemeral media forms is driven in part by the recognition that it is often in ‘the detail, the discard, that concerns with race, class and minority status reside’ (Wasserman, 2020: 36).

This essay is about the effort to create a record of what women are doing in web series. Emerging in the US at the end of the last century, web series are short-form series distributed on the internet that achieved global popularity. By the 2010s, ‘webfests’ were springing up in cities from Los Angeles to Seoul to Rio de Janeiro, hosting awards and providing spaces for web series creators to connect with one another. Despite their popularity, web series remain an unsettled form, so nebulous that no consensus about their name has ever emerged, with terms such as ‘digital shorts’, ‘webisodes’, ‘independent TV’ and ‘web television’ all in circulation.

Web series are vulnerable to ephemerality on several counts. First the episodes are short. Early in the form’s evolution, episode lengths of 10 minutes were common, but episodes may be as little as 1 minute, as in the case of the hit Tik Tok series, The Formal (2021–2022), or a few seconds, as in the case of series made for Snapchat Originals or earlier, for Vine. Additionally, web series are often made by those outside the screen industry, taking advantage of lower-cost digital technology and the opportunity furnished by the internet to self-distribute one’s work. For many creators, web series are a ‘calling card’, an industry term invoking a classic piece of 19th century ephemera to describe content designed to showcase the talents of cast and crew. Alternatively, web series may be seen as ‘a proof of concept’, a way to test audience appetites for a story idea. Attention to web series means rescuing a media form that is often intended to be discarded once it has served its purpose. And while web series are not made of flimsy, disposable materials, the attention economy of the internet furnishes other ways for media work to disappear – links may fail, platforms collapse – and an absence of care or resources can make it easy for a work to vanish into the chaotic chatter of the internet.

Why not let web series disappear? Setting aside the high-quality, award-winning web series displayed in festivals that are clearly so much more than a calling card, web series matter because as a form made by industry outsiders who have full creative control and no obligation to please advertisers, they are a potential vehicle for innovation (Christian, 2018). A body of scholarship points to web series as a space to find new and original narratives about communities that are rarely represented in mainstream media with any depth or complexity (Leder, 2021; Levine, 2023; Luo, 2023; Salam-Salmaoui and Salam, 2024). Web series tell culturally-specific stories about people who are multiply marginalized (Christian and White, 2020), ranging from black and Latino trans narratives (Daye and Christian, 2017) to feminist minorities among religious Zionist women (Aharoni, 2023) and people of all walks of life living with disability (Ellis, 2016). Web series have been embraced by underrepresented people globally, giving voice to Ghanian women interrogating gender and sexual mores (Arthur, 2019), making visible the intersections of sexuality, caste and geography in India (Najar, 2025) and articulating queer desire in postsocialist China (Luo, 2023). To date, however, these studies invariably focus on textual analysis of individual web series, looking at what stories are told, rather than who is telling them. One clear exception is Aymar Jean Christian whose monograph on web series, Open TV (2018), and subsequent work (Christian, 2019; Christian and White, 2020) highlight the need to open up the development and production process of television and other legacy media to historically excluded creators. As Christian comments, genuine change in screen industries requires that both the production and distribution of media should be ‘like organic food, “sourced” from the [historically disempowered] community it serves and in which it must thrive’ (Christian and White, 2020: 145).

Christian is not alone in perceiving web series as a way to build new pipelines of creative labour from marginalized communities into the screen industry. The perception is buoyed by high-profile cases of minority women who have used web series to launch careers in film and television. In America, Awkward Black Girl (2011–2013) famously jumpstarted the career of African American actor writer and producer Issa Rae, who went on to create and star in the award-winning HBO series Insecure (Rae, 2016–2021) and appear in blockbuster films such as Barbie (Gerwig, 2023). In Australia, the success of Starting from Now (2014–2016), the globally popular Australian web series about ‘four lesbian protagonists who weren’t traumatized by their sexuality or killed off as a plot device’ (Kalceff, 2021: A Skeleton Crew and a Shoestring Budget section) turned Julie Kalceff into a writer and director of pioneering television shows such as First Day (2020), a children’s series featuring a transgender protagonist which won an international Emmy in 2021. Similarly, Winnifred Jong’s Tokens (2019–2023), a Canadian comedy web series about race and ethnic diversity casting, propelled her from script supervisor to becoming an award-winning director working on television shows for Apple+ (Jane, Johnson, 2023–2025) and Netflix (Firefly Lane, Friedman, 2021–2023). But to what extent are women-led web series the exception rather than the rule? In the thousands of web series made globally, are women finding new opportunities?

To answer this question and to explore what is happening in web series more broadly, we created an international archive of web series. We had two objectives: to build an archive large enough to analyse international trends in web series production and to use this archive to explore the representation of women behind the camera.

Because the creation of an archive of ephemeral media is one key outcome of this study, the next section explains how we put it together.

Building the archive

A challenge in tracking web series activity is the absence of any database that systematically records web series creation. IMDb allows entries for web series but contributors are explicitly requested to submit their web series as ‘made for tv: tv series’. ¹

To build the archive, the authors drew on records of web series submitted to web series festivals. In the film industry, the festival circuit in film offers an alternative network for marketing and distributing films made outside the studio system (Elsaesser, 2005). Similarly, web series festivals provide creators with ways to introduce their series to international audiences, to earn attention and attract buyers through the accumulation of festival awards. Beginning with the LA Webfest in 2009, web festivals have since spread to other media capitals in Europe, the Americas and Asia.

Based on an existing partnership established for a large-scale international study of web series, ² we gained access to the historical submission records of five leading web festivals in regions that are prolific producers of web series, including the Marseille Webfest in France, the Toronto and Vancouver Webfests in Canada, the Melbourne International Webfest in Australia and the Rio Webfest in Brazil. Given that web festivals offer not only the chance to advertise a series, but also provide training and education for creators on how to pitch ideas and find funding and distribution for their work, they are likely to capture many web series made by those aiming for a career in the screen industry or looking to contact other series creators.

However, not everyone who makes a web series can afford to pay the submission fees charged by some web festivals which, while low, may be beyond the reach of those self-funding their web series through ‘sweat equity’. To capture more of the global population of web series, we combined festival submission records with two independent datasets of web series. The first was a large catalogue of web series, compiled by Joël Bassaget, an internationally recognized expert on the web series industry, and the founder of the Web Series World Cup, established in 2005 to promote quality web series that were travelling the world web festival circuit. Bassaget’s dataset captured web series titles released between 2008 and 2021 and was previously published in a 2019 book co-authored with Meredith Burkholder. ³ The second source was an archive of 175 web series collected in Canada between 2010 and 2015 by Zboralska (2018) as part of her doctoral research using annual reports of Canada’s Independent Production Fund (which began supporting web series in 2010), supplemented with a systematic search of video-sharing platforms, industry trade magazines and social media sites. After merging datasets and removing duplicates, we had an archive of 10,662 titles with associated country and release year data. The archive makes no claim to be globally representative, as our sources were focussed on web series titles made using the Roman alphabet. Nonetheless, it is to our knowledge the largest archive of web series in existence currently. ⁴

Which countries make web series?

Figure 1 shows the top 10 countries producing web series between 2012 and 2019. The dataset included web series from 132 countries, but the majority of the web series were made by a small group of countries.

Figure 1.

Number of web series by country 2012-2019.

Over this period, the US accounts for 43 per cent of all web series made, followed by Brazil (11%), Canada (7%), France (6%), India (6%) and Australia (5%). Each year, the US made more web series that any other country, but the figure shows the surge in the popularity of web series in India and Brazil from 2016 onwards; by 2019, both India and Brazil rival the output of the US. As noted, the archive is limited to titles using the Roman alphabet and therefore excludes high-producing countries such as South Korea and China.

Do women make web series? In the next section, we explain our decision to focus on gender with a brief overview of patterns of gender inequality in the screen industry.

Gender inequities in the screen industry

There is abundant evidence of the scarcity of women in senior creative roles in film and television industries. The most recent report on who occupies the director’s chair in Hollywood found that over the last 17 years, only 6 per cent of directors of the top 100 grossing films were women (Smith and Pieper, 2024). Improvements in gender equality in above-the-line roles has been minimal; in 2022, women accounted for 24 per cent of all above-the-line roles in the top 250 grossing feature films, representing an increase of a mere seven percentage points over two decades (Lauzen, 2023).

Globally, the picture is not much better. A study of films released in 40 countries found that women directed 15 per cent of the films released between 2012 and 2015 (Verhoeven et al., 2019). In Europe, between 2016 and 2020, women made up 20 per cent of directors of European feature films, 25 per cent of screenwriters and 10 per cent of cinematographers (Simone, 2021).

Women are better represented in above-the-line roles in television, but are still a long way from equality. In the US, during the 2021–2022 season, 79 per cent of the shows broadcast or streamed had no women directors, 65 per cent no women writers, and 92 per cent no women directors of photography (Lauzen, 2022). A major study of television in the UK found that women are steered into genres considered more ‘feminine’ such as children’s television or soap opera, which offer fewer opportunities for career advancement (Johnson and Peirse, 2021). Similar findings have been reported in other national television industries (O’Brien, 2015).

Gender discrimination affects every aspect of the screen industry. To take just the role of director as an example, women directors are less likely to be seen as good risks for film financing (Coles and Eikhof, 2021), more likely to receive low budgets (Smith et al., 2020) or no budgets (Raveney et al., 2016), less likely to have their films receive a theatrical screening and more likely to have a short theatrical window if they do (Verhoeven et al., 2019), and more likely to leave the industry early (Wing-Fai et al., 2015). It is in this context that web series have been hailed as having the potential to open doors within the screen industry not just for the stories, but also for the talent of creative workers from marginalized groups. We focus on gender to see whether anecdotal reports of greater participation by women in web series are supported in the aggregate.

To analyse gender patterns, we selected five of the top web series-producing countries to sample: US, Canada, France, Australia and the UK. This selection gave us countries that are leading producers of web series in environments characterized by varying levels of support for women creators or for web series. The US does not subsidize new digital media, although creators can apply for grants from a number of private foundations. ⁵ Likewise, its support for women in the screen industry has come largely from the private sector and non-profits such as the Geena Davis Institute. Conversely, from 2015 to 2018, government agencies in Canada, Australia and the UK adopted measures to boost the representation of women in key creative roles in the screen industry. In Australia and Canada, where government funding support for online content is relatively high, financial incentives for recruitment of women include web series (Canada Media Fund, 2017; Screen Australia, 2019). France adopted measures to fund new digital content including web series through the Centre National de la Cinématographie et de L’Image Animée (CNC) ‘Talent Fund’, but no funds were specifically dedicated to women (Centre National de la Cinématographie et de l’Image Animée (CNC), 2017). Historically, France has been reluctant to introduce quotas or incentives targeting gender (Raveney et al., 2016). This has started to change. In 2018, the efforts of the feminist 50/50 Collectif succeeded in negotiating limited financial incentives for films whose production crew included women in key roles, but this did not include web series (Nayeri, 2018).

To examine whether the numbers of women making web series changed over time, we restricted the years of the database from 2012 to 2019 to capture the peak period of web series production before the pandemic. The years were then grouped into 2-year time blocks, with the aim of keeping the sample sizes manageable, while still being able to observe change over time.

The minimum sample size for each 2-year time block was calculated using Cochran’s formula for a small population (Cochran, 1977: 75–76). Titles were then selected for each year block/country category using simple random sampling without replacement. Calculations averaged across the five countries were weighted to ensure the results were not biased.

Above-the-line roles in web series

Since web series are a relatively new media format, we were interested in what kind of above-the-line roles would be typically credited and how many people occupied them. Would web series resemble television series, which tend to have one showrunner and multiple directors and writers, or would web series be more like films, crediting a single director?

Figure 2 profiles web series for the five countries in our sample, showing the average number of people listed as creators or directors, writers, producers and cinematographers for each web series. The names used for above-the-line-roles in web series varied; the person filming the series might be called the ‘cinematographer’, ‘camera operator’, or ‘director of photography’. In cases where directors were also filming the series, there would be no separate credit listed. Similarly, the ‘producer’ category in our data includes anyone listed as ‘executive producer’ or ‘associate producer’, for those titles where such distinctions were made. Because web series are often low-budget ventures made with minimal resources, it is common for people to occupy several above-the line roles at once, serving as ‘director-writers’ or ‘director-writer-producer’.

Figure 2.

Mean number of people in each role.

As shown in Figure 2, web series tend to have between one and two directors credited and about the same number of writers. The data suggest that web series are more like television in typically having more than one director working on the series. There were few differences between countries, although web series made in France, the UK and the US were less likely to credit a cinematographer.

Identifying gender

To collect information about the gender of the people in key creative roles, the research team tallied the number of females, males and people identifying as non-binary who were credited as writer, director, producer and cinematographer for each title. Where a series had multiple seasons, only the first season was analysed to see who was involved in establishing the web series. Sources of gender information included IMDb, YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo and individual series’ web pages. Gender was determined case by case, using images, biographical information and names, by a researcher fluent in the dominant language of the relevant country. Where no information could be found for a sampled web series title, it was replaced using random sampling.

The number of people in key creative roles who identified as non-binary was very low and not statistically significant for any of the groups. Overall, 13 creatives identified as non-binary on Australian web series, nine on US web series, six on Canadian web series, three on French web series and none on UK web series. These counts were not large enough for separate statistical analysis, so the non-binary category was merged with women.

Web series production by gender

As shown, a large number of web series are led by women: 44 per cent of Australian web series and over a third of web series made in both Canada and the US have a woman director, and two-thirds of web series have a woman producer. Moreover, in these three countries, equal numbers of women and men are writing web series, and more women than men are producing them. The one senior creative role that continues to be dominated by men is cinematography. The proportion of web series with female cinematographers ranged from just 8 per cent in France to 19 per cent in the US (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Percentage of web series with at least one woman in an above-the-line role.

Of the five countries in our sample, female participation in key creative roles was highest in Australia, the US and Canada, and lowest in the UK and France. The difference between the two groups of countries was significant at the 0.05 level. ⁶

Because our data showed that web series often included more than one person working in the same above-the-line role, we also looked at what percentage of all people in the role were women.

As shown in Table 1, this reduced the percentage of women in each above-the-line role. For example, 38 per cent of web series made in the US had at least one female as a director, but overall, women make up only 30 per cent of directors of web series in that country. Similar patterns are evident in the other countries: in Australia, 44 per cent of web series have a woman as a director, but women make up only 34 per cent of directors overall. What these results indicate is that in all five countries, a proportion of the women are co-directing the web series with a male director. The roles of writer and producer are also likely to feature mixed male and female teams. Only cinematography continues to be dominated by a single gender.

Table 1.

Women as a proportion of all people in various roles.

Country of origin	Creator/director (%)	Writer (%)	Producer (%)	Cinematographer (%)
Australia	34	39	47	13
Canada	29	36	40	12
France	13	19	22	5
UK	20	30	36	10
USA	30	37	46	14

Once again, there are clear differences in female participation by role and by country. In all five countries, female participation is highest among producers: in Australia, the proportion of women working as producers (47%) was statistically equivalent to parity and approaching parity in the US (46%). Writers have the next highest level of female participation, ranging from a high of 39 per cent (Australia) to a low of 19 per cent (France). The percentage of women credited as creators or directors of web series followed a similar pattern: it was highest in Australia (34%) and lowest in France (13%).

In all five countries, women are dramatically underrepresented among cinematographers on web series; between 86% and 95% of cinematographers on web series that listed a cinematographer were male, mirroring trends in the film and television industry more broadly (Coles et al., 2022).

Trends in women’s participation in web series

Did women’s participation in above-the-line roles increase as web series grew in popularity and incentives for recruitment of women were introduced (in some countries) through the second decade of the 21st century? Figure 4 compares the percentage of women directors, writers, producers and cinematographers during the first 2 years (2012–2013) and the last 2 years (2018–2019) of our study period.

Figure 4.

Web series with at least one woman in a role over time.

As seen, the proportion of women directing and writing web series increases in all countries, and the number of women producing web series also increases in all countries except for the UK. These increases were statistically significant for women working as directors or writers across all countries except for the UK. ⁷

Do women directors/creators of web series recruit more women to above-the-line roles?

One reason that research on gender equality in the screen industry has concentrated on the role of director is evidence that women directors are more likely to recruit women to other above-the-line roles (Lauzen, 2020). To see if the gender of the director or creator makes a difference in web series, we split the sample into two groups: the first consisting of web series with at least one female director or creator, and the second consisting of web series with no women directors. We then looked at how many web series had at least one woman as producer, writer or cinematographer for the two groups.

As demonstrated in Figure 5, having a female director or creator on a web series strongly affects the gender of the other key roles. Across all five countries, web series with a female creator or director were more than twice as likely to feature women producers, and more than four times as likely to feature women writers. Testing revealed that these figures were statistically significant, except for cinematographers in France and the UK, where having a female director did not significantly increase the likelihood of a female behind the camera.

Figure 5.

Women in above-the-line roles for web series with a female director.

Conclusion: Women and web series, 2012–2019

In the second decade of the 21st century, as web series took off, women in Canada, the US and Australia embraced the new format in large numbers. By the end of the decade, over half of all web series made in the US or Australia had a woman director and 44 per cent of web series made in Canada had a female director on board. By 2019, women actually exceeded men in the numbers working as producers or writers for web series made in Canada, Australia and the US. Only cinematography remained stubbornly male dominated.

Our study also produced some interesting gender differences between the top five countries making web series. Between 2012 and 2019, the numbers of women directing, writing and producing web series were consistently higher in Australia, Canada and the US compared to France and the UK. A full explanation of the social and cultural factors that shape women’s participation in creative industries in different countries is beyond the scope of this essay. Nevertheless, it is suggestive that women were less likely to make web series in France and the UK where incentives and policy support for boosting female participation in the screen industry have been negligible or problematic. In France, policies targeting gender in the screen industry have been slow to develop due to conflicts with deeply felt historical commitments to a universalism that is seen as antithetical to such measures (Biscarrat et al., 2016; Scott, 1997). Although the UK has sought to promote diversity in its screen media sector, a report by the UK Creative Diversity Network (2023) revealed that the number of women directing film and television had actually declined, a fact that was attributed to the piecemeal way in which such policies were applied (Skadi et al., 2024).

Given the emergence of a new media format, women were quick to take the creative reins, to produce, write and direct their own series in numbers well in excess of the representation of women in these roles in film and television. Our results shine a light on what women can do when the traditional gatekeepers who control hiring and finance are removed. A woman can decide by herself to write and direct a web series if she can find enough friends with the equipment, time and willingness to collaborate. The figures for web series are closer to the gender profile of another low-budget format, the short film. Estimates of the percentage of short films directed by women or non-binary directors vary between 28 per cent (Smith et al., 2015) and 39 per cent (Langouche, 2021). This is similar to our findings: averaged across the five countries, 34 per cent of web series have at least one female as a director. Like web series, short films have also traditionally been seen as a stepping stone to a career in feature films, although how well the short film works for women in this regard is unclear. One study pointed to the dramatic drop-off in the percentage of female directors moving from narrative short films (28%), to television episodes (16%) and finally to the top-grossing 150 feature films (4%; Smith et al., 2015).

We do not know as yet whether web series are better at contributing to the careers of women in the screen industry, but it is worth noting that web series have a few advantages over short films as a launchpad. First, as a serial format, web series are more likely to be picked up by the algorithms used by video-sharing platforms, where the regular appearance of new content increases the likelihood that someone will see your creative work (Healy, 2022). The opportunity to receive feedback on the series from an audience is also a chance for the creators to gain a sense of who their audience is, and establishing an audience can also strengthen a pitch for future jobs by showing that an appetite for their work exists. The serial format may also make web series a more useful calling card than the short film for a wider range of careers in the screen industry by showing that the creator knows how to write for the series format that dominates scripted television, in addition to showing that the creator can manage the longer time frames and narrative arcs required by both television and feature films.

For those web series helmed by women, our data show that having a female director makes a significant difference to other women’s prospects. In the US, Canada and Australia, the presence of a female director doubled and sometimes tripled the number of women in other above-the-line roles, with the exception (again) of cinematography. In our research, the director is the rising tide that lifts all boats. Equally important, however, is a result we did not expect: the finding that women in web series are often co-directing with a man rather than directing by themselves or with another woman. As shown in Figure 5, over one in six of the web series in our sample were directed by male-female director teams (Figure 6).

Figure 6.

Gender of web series director teams.

This matters because of the nature of the work in creative industries. Work in the screen industry is precarious, project-oriented and risky. In such an environment, networks become even more important as a way to manage risk by hiring people who are familiar (Raveney et al., 2016). But network cultures have proven detrimental to women because they tend to be organized along gender lines, thereby deepening the gender segmentation of the labour force (Christopherson, 2008). When men are more likely to be in a position to recruit others, the jobs are much more likely to go to those in their networks, and those, in turn, are much more likely to be other men (Grugulis and Stoyanova, 2012; Verhoeven and Palmer, 2016). The fact that web series often feature mixed gender teams may suggest they have the potential to begin to break the monolithic gender cultures of the screen industry by building more inclusive social and professional relations. As one study concluded in an examination of the failure of gender diversity policies to produce much change in gender equality behind the camera, ‘Simply adding more women is not the most effective pathway to creating change. Instead, our findings stress the importance of revising the relational networks that underpin the formation of creative teams’. (Verhoeven et al., 2020: 23).

At the beginning of this essay, we drew a parallel between web series and the ephemeral one reelers made during the silent cinema era. According to archivist Pierce (2013), who oversees the Library of Congress archive of film in the US, 70 per cent of these early films have been lost; many of them were directed, produced and written by women. In the silent era, women were employed at every level of the industry, from script girls and stenographers to screenwriters and producers. Historian Anthony Slide observes, ‘During the first three decades of its existence, the American film industry was, in many ways, a woman’s world’ (Slide, 1977/2022: iii). The low-budget experimental nature of the film industry in its early years gave women the chance to try out every kind of production role from lighting to set design to editing, a fact that ‘kept each craft roughly equal in status and lowered incipient gender boundaries’ (Mahar, 2001: 39). This included the craft of directing. Years before women obtained the vote in America, they were accepted as legitimate directors of the new motion picture form. A 1920 book published by Houghton Miffler entitled Careers for Women included a whole chapter on ‘motion picture director’ as a recommended occupation for women, one where, as Ida May Park, author of the section and herself a prolific director, says, ‘the superiority of [women’s] emotional and imaginative faculties gives them a great advantage’ (cited in Slide, 1977/2022: 144–145).

In the 21st century, web series have afforded similar opportunities to women. In the production culture of web series, the low stakes, low budget circumstances mean that people are required to perform more than one role, including those above-the-line roles that in the screen industry are still perceived as more naturally the province of men. This study is an effort to ensure that women’s contributions to web series, unlike their contributions in silent cinema, do not disappear from cultural memory. Our results provide reasons to take ephemeral media such as web series seriously as a training ground not just for professional careers, but also for social change. At the same time, the tiny number of women picking up a camera as cinematographers reminds us of the obdurate nature of gendered production cultures and the continuing efforts it will take to shift those practices.