Why 2012 Was Not 'The Year of the Woman'

If you have eyes, the ability to read, and Internet access, you’ve probably read an article at some point this year about The Magnanimous Excellence of The Female Species and How Women Shall Inherit The Earth As Men Go Running Scared Into Oblivion. You’d think some Amazonian tribe of women was running rampant, snatching up cities across the U.S. and claiming the land for all possessors of lady parts. Sometime in the past 12 months, we decided that 2012 was the year of women, especially in the entertainment industry. But that’s not exactly true.

What 2012 actually is, is a year of some women. But our oversimplification of the status of women this year is understandable, however inaccurate. When our discourse is dominated by proclamations of women “dominating” the Senate after a record 20 women won their respective elections, the “high” number of female showrunners in television, Marissa Mayer’s corporate domination as a working mother and CEO of Yahoo, Lena Dunham’s ability to project all of our neuroses on national television in a thoughtful and powerful way, and the notion that film characters like The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and Zero Dark Thirty’s feminist-dream Maya (Jessica Chastain) signal girl power as the new norm, it’s no wonder we feel that women in 2012 hold more weight than ever. But perhaps it’s not the events themselves that are noteworthy, but rather our great proclivity for the discussion.

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“I think 2012 is a year in which women have a really powerful appetite to celebrate powerful women and our questions about where and when women are not powerful,” says Clare Winterton, Executive Director of the International Museum of Women. “The rate at which we’ve given due to those issues is very high. Whether or not that visibility is matched by concrete signs of advancement for women across the board is a big question,” she adds. The discussion around women and women’s progress, in Hollywood and elsewhere, has been given great wings in 2012, but it certainly doesn’t mean that suddenly, just before the Mayans predicted the downfall of civilization, women have “done it.” It’s still a work in progress, but one that saw a few significant boosts this year.

It’s something co-producer and co-screenwriter for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Philippa Boyens, has experienced firsthand. “I just did a producers roundtable, which was fantastic, and there were lots of female producers … there was once a time when there wouldn’t have been any women at that table, but now we make up half the table,” she says. And Boyens’ moment isn’t a singular piece of evidence for women advancing in entertainment.

Hollywood in 2012 boasts a laundry list of lady-led accomplishments. More and more women, like New Girl’s Liz Meriwether, Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23’s Nahnatchka Khan, and of course Girls’ incomparable Dunham, are running things behind the scenes of some of pop culture’s most talked about shows. Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s follow-up to her Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker, and its impressive heroine are wowing critics as the film quickly rolls towards yet another Best Director nod for Bigelow. The Venice Film Festival made headlines this year because unlike Cannes — which failed to qualify a single female director for the illustrious Palme d’Or award — it offered up four main competition spots to female directors (albeit out of a whopping 17 spots). USC film school, one of the top in the world, cites an undergraduate class that is almost half women (41 percent, to be exact), suggesting the promise of more and more great women behind the camera. Even film critics like AP’s Christy Lemire and LA Weekly’s Karina Longworth continue to be significant voices in a male-dominated conversation, and Emily Nussbaum has just completed her first year as the voice of TV criticism for The New Yorker and as one of the top voices in the field itself. And while this lineup may be enough to send some of us into the streets crying, “We’ve made it, ladies!” it’s not time for that. Yet.

“The field is so much bigger now,” says independent filmmaker and NYU film school professor Christine Choy. “But I can still count the great female directors on one hand … and in general, they don’t last too long,” she adds. For every Dunham and Bigelow, we find a handful of forgotten directors like Winter’s Bone director Debra Granik, whose name faded into the background after they rolled up the red carpet at the 2011 Academy Awards. And while folks like Bigelow and Dunham certainly seem to be standing the test of Hollywood time — which tends to move even faster than that speedy New York minute — they can’t single-handedly change the face of the unarguably male-dominated entertainment industry. “One director is not enough,” says Choy.