Films with no woman credited as director or screenwriter received 88.6% of the largest production budgets in a 30-year study, even though some films involving women delivered similar or higher median returns on investment.
The research, published in Frontiers in Communication, examined 199,656 feature-length narrative films released worldwide between 1994 and 2023. Its financial analysis covered a smaller group of 4,245 films with matched production-budget and worldwide-gross data, a group weighted towards commercially prominent US theatrical releases.
The study does not show that the gender of a director or screenwriter causes a film to be more profitable. It does raise a business question: whether the allocation of the largest budgets matches the financial patterns observed in the data.
The sharpest gap appears at the largest budgets
Male-only teams accounted for 74.8% of the top 10% of budgets and 78.6% of the top 5%. Among the 44 films in the top 1%, 39 had no woman credited in either role. The other five had at least one woman screenwriter and no woman director.
No film with a woman director, either alone or alongside a woman screenwriter, appeared in the top 1% of production budgets during the study period.
That concentration came despite one notable financial comparison. Films with at least one woman screenwriter but no woman director had a median production budget of $41.4 million, close to the $39.2 million median for male-only teams. Their median profit was $35.9 million, compared with $26.8 million, while median return on investment was 1.10 against 0.88.
For the study, return on investment was worldwide box-office gross minus the production budget, divided by that budget. It is not the same as a studio’s final accounting profit. Marketing, distribution and revenues from streaming, home entertainment and merchandise were outside the calculation.
Smaller budgets can produce similar returns
Films with women credited in both directing and screenwriting had a median budget of $19.9 million, roughly half the median for male-only films. Their median return on investment was 0.89, close to the 0.88 recorded for male-only teams.
That does not mean their total profits were the same. Projects made with less capital generally produced lower median profit in dollars. The result instead concerns the return generated for each dollar of production spending.
The director-only group produced weaker raw financial figures, but contained just 83 films in the financial sample. After the researcher adjusted for genre, the difference from male-only teams was not statistically significant. The study therefore does not support a broad claim that every type of film involving women earns more money.
Genre explains part of the pattern
Genre and release year explained part of the financial advantage associated with films that had a woman screenwriter but no woman director. The effect became smaller after those factors were considered, but remained statistically significant in the researcher’s model.
The data cannot explain why the largest budgets were concentrated so heavily among male-only teams. The paper discusses possible influences including established professional networks, loss aversion and a tendency to repeat choices that have previously appeared safe. Those are explanations considered by the author, not findings that the data can prove.
The financial records also have limits. Production budgets and worldwide gross are more readily available for prominent theatrical releases than for smaller, independent or streaming films. Gender was inferred from first names, a method the author says can be less reliable for some linguistic groups. The study identifies associations, not a causal effect of a team’s gender composition.
The industry gap remains visible
Separate industry data point to a continuing imbalance. San Diego State University’s 2025 Celluloid Ceiling report found that women accounted for 13% of directors and 20% of writers working on the 250 highest-grossing US films released in 2024.
Questions about who receives production capital sit alongside other choices changing film economics. Our earlier coverage of Hollywood’s interest in synthetic performers examined a separate issue, but both debates concern where studios place creative control, employment and financial risk.
For film financiers, the study’s narrow conclusion is not that a credit should be treated as a guarantee of commercial success. It is that the available results do not offer a simple financial case for keeping the biggest projects concentrated among male-only teams.
