Nearly Two-Thirds of Industry’s Female Writers Have Been Sexually Harassed On the Job, New Survey Finds
In February of this year, the WGA West sent a survey to its membership to inquire about their experiences with sexual harassment over the course of their careers, and the results have been revealed. Deadline has published the survey’s findings, including responses that hold “64% of female writers say they’ve experienced sexual harassment sometime in their careers,” and that “a significant amount of the harassment writers experience occurs in the writers’ room.” The survey also found that “11% of male writers said that they too had experienced sexual harassment on the job,” and that “many more writers have witnessed harassment.”
More than 2,000 of the guild’s members responded to the survey, which comprises about a fifth of the guild’s total active membership. In a statement to Deadline, the guild commented that the survey results “have given us a sobering, first-person insight into the conditions that make addressing the issue both essential and urgent.”
As Deadline notes, in January, the guild issued a Statement of Principles on Sexual Harassment with the aim that it would “form the basis of our policies and actions going forward” and serve “as our starting point toward meaningful change in our industry’s treatment of sexual harassment and discrimination.”
Deadline also shares that the guild is currently working on a number of responses to the issue, including the “possibility” of starting a series of conversations about how to craft a “successful writing room,” presumably meaning one that is not rife with sexual harassment.
The guild also told the outlet that the survey responses will continue to inform and motivate changes as they pursue “ways to eliminate sexual harassment and assault, and, indeed, harassment of all types, from the professional lives of writers and those who work with them.”
