Excessive racial and gender wage gaps are forcing many to leave the film, television and media-industries.
Racialised lgbtqia filmworkers and filmmakers have a lot of odds stacked against them. Many express that they are often expected to work for free and for longer periods of time. They are also rarely ever given the same opportunities to climb the career ladder as those less marginalised. As such many tend to leave the film industry due to the fact that they are unable to keep working for very little wages (or none at all) adding onto other concerns such as being ostracised by the industries’ workplace cultures as well as being intentionally or unintentionally discouraged to pursue their own forms and styles of storytelling. A couple of reasonable actions towards a decrease in the professional alienation of racialized lgbtqia+ filmworkers and filmmakers are the following:
- Further inclusive networking initiatives are essential. These should be established by the authority figures and institutions in the film, television and media sectors but led together with the marginalised groups that these industries are looking to reach out to.
- Distribution and screening strategies for moving images made by filmmakers of marginalised backgrounds ought to be cultivated by established institutions in the film, television and media sectors, as these would contribute to the amplification of BIPOC* lgbtqia+ filmworkers and filmmakers’ voices and works.
*BIPOC is an acronym which stands for Black, Indigenous and people of colour and is used here in equivalence to “racialized” people.