Situation Report

TO audiences, the women behind the performers, the women who design or edit or photograph or write, are invisible. Indeed, backstage and offscreen, those women are all but invisible too--because there are so few of them.

How few is hard to say. TV networks and movie companies decline to release figures on their female employees, and some craft unions do not keep track of membership by sex. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Machine Operators will say only that its women members tend to be concentrated in such job areas as prop makers, costumers, makeup and hair stylists, publicists and lab technicians. Even in these jobs they are outnumbered by men. The Writers Guild of America, Inc., which includes movie scriptwriters and writers of TV news and entertainment shows, has an estimated membership of 4,500. Of that number, a spokesman guesses that two out of seven are women.

Film editing offers more opportunity to women, relatively speaking; New York Local 771, for example, which comprises TV as well as movie film editors, has nearly 1,000 members of whom 90 are female. But women film editors have attained a disproportionate level of accomplishment. Among the top practitioners in the field are such women as Mili Bonsignori (Hunger in America, What If the Dream Comes True? for CBS), Thelma Schoonmaker (Woodstock) and Dede Allen (Bonnie and Clyde, Little Big Man).

On the other hand, editors of TV video tape are almost all men. The three major networks have only one female tape technician. In other technical areas, there is only one union film camerawoman in the nation--though with increasing use of smaller, lighter 16-mm. cameras there may soon be more. A few women also freelance as sound technicians for TV and more often for radio.

Despite some recent changes, female producers and directors are still scarce. In TV, woman producers usually have to find a niche by specializing in daytime, documentary or educational shows rather than in hard news or prime-time entertainment.

Even in the performing areas--where, after all, there is no substitute for a woman when the script calls for one--disparities appear. Feminists argue that a male point of view prevails in deciding whether male or female characters are more interesting. A recent rundown showed that movies currently in production called for 144 men in featured roles v. 66 women. In 26 new TV shows for the fall season, men outnumbered women in the casts by 283 to 81.

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