There are 39 major studio releases coming this summer. Only one is directed by a woman.

In the summer of 2014, 39 major studio films were heading to theaters. Exactly one had a female director — Lana Wachowski, co-directing Jupiter Ascending with her sibling. Christopher Ingraham, a data reporter at The Washington Post's Wonkblog, wanted to know whether that ratio was a fluke or a pattern. He pulled five years of box-office data and used Genderize.io to find out.

The analysis

Ingraham examined the top 400 films by domestic box-office gross for each year from 2009 to 2013 — roughly 2,000 films in total. He used Genderize.io to classify director names by gender, building a picture of who was actually getting to make the movies that audiences paid to see.

What the numbers showed

In 2013, women directed approximately 14% of the top 400 grossing films, up from about 8% in 2010. Progress — but slow, and concentrated at the margins. Among the top 100 highest-grossing films, only 2 were directed by women.

Genre mattered. Nearly a quarter of documentaries released between 2009 and 2013 were directed by women. Romantic comedies and dramas also had higher female representation. But in the big-budget action and adventure categories — the films that dominate summer release schedules and generate the largest revenues — women were almost entirely absent.

The seasonal pattern told its own story. Female-directed releases peaked in May and September, tracking the rom-com calendar. The summer blockbuster corridor, where studios concentrate their biggest bets, remained overwhelmingly male.

The vicious cycle

Ingraham identified the core mechanism as a financing problem. Studios allocate large budgets to directors with proven commercial track records. Since women have historically been locked out of high-grossing genres, few build the track record that unlocks the next big-budget opportunity. The result is self-reinforcing: women can't get blockbuster budgets because they haven't directed blockbusters, and they haven't directed blockbusters because they can't get the budgets.

Why it mattered

The piece landed during a growing public conversation about Hollywood's gender problem. By grounding the argument in five years of box-office data rather than anecdote, Ingraham gave the debate a factual spine. The finding that just 2 of the top 100 films were directed by women was picked up widely — a number concrete enough to be difficult to explain away.