Movies Written By Women Earn Higher Returns, But Female-Directed Films Get Smaller Budgets

Women Screenwriters Beat the Market, Women Directors Never Get the Budget to Try

Films with a woman screenwriter (but no woman director) posted a typical return on investment 25 percent higher than movies made entirely by men, according to a new analysis of nearly 200,000 films spanning three decades. Typical profits, as the study defines them, ran 34 percent richer on comparable budgets. Yet within the financial data examined, not one film directed by a woman, alone or paired with a woman writer, ever cracked the top 1 percent of production budgets across the entire span.

That contradiction sits at the center of a study published in Frontiers in Communication. Researcher Anja G. Huwiler, of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, examined films released between 1994 and 2023 using IMDb data, then focused on 4,245 films with verified budget and box office numbers attached.

Huwiler frames this less as a story of bias and more as an economic puzzle. Studios are supposed to chase whichever projects pay off best, so women screenwriters should be attracting more resources, and women directors should be landing bigger budgets given how strongly women-written films performed. Instead, the study calls it “an economically puzzling disconnect,” in which strong financial performance simply is not steering where the money goes.

Nearly Three-Quarters of Films Credit No Women in Either Role

Huwiler pulled data on 199,656 feature films at least 60 minutes long, released between 1994 and 2023, sorting each into one of four groups: a woman director with no woman writer, a woman writer with no woman director, women in both jobs, or no women in either role. Gender was determined using a tool that checks whether a first name is statistically linked to men or women, a method less reliable for non-Western naming conventions, so some women filmmakers may not have been counted.

Patterns across the full set were stark. About 74 percent of films credited no women in either directing or screenwriting. Just 4.5 percent had a woman director without a woman writer, 11.2 percent had a woman writer without a woman director, and 10.5 percent had women in both roles. That financial group of 4,245 films leans heavily toward big, mostly U.S. theatrical releases, and it forms the basis for the dollar figures below.

Women-Written Films Post the Strongest Returns of the Four Groups

Films written by women, without a woman director attached, posted a typical return on investment of 1.10, meaning for every dollar spent, the movie generated about $1.10 in additional box office revenue after covering its budget. Male-only films posted 0.88, still solid, just smaller. The study calculates profit as worldwide box office revenue minus production budget, skipping marketing, distribution, streaming, and other costs and revenues. By that measure, typical profit ran $35.9 million for the women-written group against $26.8 million for male-only productions, on comparable budgets of about $41.4 million versus $39.2 million.

Films with women credited as both director and writer told a different story. Their typical return, 0.89, nearly matched male-only films’ 0.88, but on a budget of just $19.9 million, about half what male-only productions received. Films directed by women without a woman writer showed the weakest returns, 0.44, though that figure comes from a small group of just 83 films.

Zooming in on the top 10, 5, and 1 percent of budgets in that sample, the gap widened instead of closing. Woman-written films in the top 10 percent posted a typical return of 2.15, against 1.62 for male-only films. In the top 1 percent, just 44 films total, woman-written films posted 2.84 and typical profit of $930.4 million, both higher than male-only films. Women directors, meanwhile, made up just 1.4 percent of that top 10 percent and 0.5 percent of the top 5 percent, extending the shutout already noted at the very top.

Audience opinion does not explain the gap. Ratings across all four groups stayed within a quarter of a point of each other, and voting gaps mostly disappeared at the highest tiers too. Movies written by women earned the highest average ratings there, 7.4 out of 10 in the top 1 percent group, against 6.8 for male-only films. Huwiler also checked whether results were a quirk of genre. After adjusting for film type and year, the woman-written advantage shrank a little but held up.

Women’s Participation Did Not Accelerate After #MeToo

Public attention to gender inequity in Hollywood spiked sharply once #MeToo gained momentum in 2017, and participation numbers for women directors and writers might have been expected to climb faster afterward. Testing found a small, one-time bump around that year, but no lasting change in the pace of growth. Women’s involvement in directing crept from 3.4 percent of films in 1994 to 5.1 percent in 2023. Screenwriting participation barely moved, staying between roughly 10 and 12 percent throughout. Only films where women both directed and wrote grew fastest over those 30 years, nearly doubling from 6.7 percent to 12.6 percent.

Three decades of data leave an unusual pattern. Films with a woman screenwriter and no woman director often performed as well or better than male-only productions, yet women stayed scarce in the biggest-budget projects. Whether studios ever adjust budgets to match those returns remains an open question.

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Disclaimer: This article summarizes findings from a single peer-reviewed study and is intended for general informational purposes. The study identifies statistical associations, not proof of cause and effect, and its financial findings are drawn from a subset of commercially documented, predominantly U.S. theatrical releases rather than the full film industry. Readers seeking the full methodology and data should consult the original paper.

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