After a turbulent past year, the call for more female power, representation, and diversity in film is louder than ever. ELLE joins the conversation with our map of where women in Hollywood are making it happen, and where there's still room to grow.
It's been a year since the infamous Sony hacks—the deluge of damning internal data from Sony Pictures Entertainment, personal information about employees and their families, incriminating e-mails between studio executives, information about said executives' salaries, copies of unreleased films, etc.—flooded the Internet. What they showed in our part of the world was that it's not over, folks; there's a long way to go toward equality for women in Hollywood. Beyond learning that many of the industry's top actresses were being severely underpaid in relation to their male counterparts (as was the case with Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams, compared with their American Hustle costars Bradley Cooper and Christian Bale), we also learned that of Sony studio's 17 seven-figure earners, almost all were white, and only one, Amy Pascal, was female. Speaking of Pascal, the former co-chairperson of the motion-picture group at Sony and one of the most powerful women in Hollywood, she took the biggest hit, getting fired from the company while many of the men embroiled in the scandal got nary a slap on the wrist.But if there's a break in the clouds, it's that the facts that came to light not only spurred conversation for higher pay, better roles, and greater diversity behind and in front of the camera, but they kept it going beyond red carpets and award-show podiums. Thus, ELLE is using the occasion of our annual Women in Hollywood Power List to contextualize power as it truly exists among the women doing the deals, scoring the material, writing the screenplays, raising the money, casting, dressing, and directing the actresses, opening the movies, and, yes, running the studios.