The Impact of Gender Equality in Film Festival Management on the Female Representation of Awarded Film Directors

This thesis investigates the gender equality within film festivals management teams and its influence on the female representation of awarded film directors. As a masculine organisational culture create a gender gap, Hofstede’s dimensions, which measure organisational cultures per country, have been used. Both the researched film festival organisations and the awarded film directors show a gender gap, which is persistent in both Europe and North America. The film festivals which have been established earlier, seem to have more female directors and executives. Film festivals with more female employees also have more female directors and executives. All in all, this research did not find a causal relationship between the gender of film festival management teams and the gender of the awarded film festivals. Nonetheless, it did find that certain aspects of the geographical location, and the longitude of existence of a film festival affects the female representation within the director and executives’ positions and amongst the film festival team members in general. It is important that film festivals implement gender equality in their organisations because they have the power to influence the success of awarded film directors and influence society’s perspective on gender roles