Project overview
The ARHC-IAA funded research project Calling the Shots: gender equality in the film industry, a transnational approach has been led by Professor Shelley Cobb as Principal Investigator and Dr Jara Fernandez-Meneses as Co-investigator.
Awarded £4,077.79 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council Impact Acceleration Account at the University of Southampton, it ran from July 2023 to June 2024. Bringing together research on the UK and Spanish film industries conducted by, respectively, Cobb and Fernandez-Meneses, the project did two key things.
First, it compared the two nations’ historical similarities in the underrepresentation of women in the two industries; and, second, it examined the differences in the opportunities and challenges to achieving gender equality in each national industry created by their distinct regulatory, and political, contexts. The key goal of the project was to share national data and policy actions on gender inequality in filmmaking to exchange best practices and potentially instigate new approaches in both the UK and Spain.
