#MeToo forced Hollywood to reckon with its past — but did it actually change the future of filmmaking? Looking at years of behind-the-scenes and on-screen data, associate professor Hong Luo explores how the wide-spread social movement did — and did not — change movie-making; how stigma, coordination and market-wide shocks influence organizational behaviour; and why large-scale movements can create opportunities for change that weren’t profitable or possible before.
#MeToo forced Hollywood to reckon with its past — but did it actually change the future of filmmaking?
Looking at years of behind-the-scenes and on-screen data, associate professor Hong Luo explores how the wide-spread social movement did — and did not — change movie-making; how stigma, coordination and market-wide shocks influence organizational behaviour; and why large-scale movements can create opportunities for change that just weren’t profitable or possible before.
Show Notes
Show notes
[0:22] It’s been nearly a decade since the New York Times broke the news of Harvey Weinstein’s abuse of women in Hollywood, sparking the #MeToo movement, which called out multiple men in the film and TV industry.
[1:28] Meet Hong Luo, an associate professor of strategic management at the Rotman School of Management, who studies how industry-wide innovation happens. So, in the wake of #MeToo, she turned her attention to Hollywood.
[2:49] Women are underrepresented behind the camera in Hollywood – and while many factors contribute, widespread sexual abuse is among one of the reasons.
[3:36] To determine whether #MeToo had the power to change the film industry, she looked at how film teams associated with Harvey Weinstein changed compared to those not associated with him.
[4:37] Producers with a history of working with Weinstein were more likely to hire female talent behind the camera after the #MeToo movement than those without.
[5:55] Lots of reasons probably drove the change, but Hong hypothesizes that the publicity and associated guilt helped the change along.
[6:54] One key finding; projects that had at least one woman on the creative team were more likely than those without to make it to theatre.
[8:06] After the behind-the-camera shift, Hong wanted to know if more female-fronted stories were told.
[8:31] If the team behind the scenes was all male, then yes – they were more likely to produce a movie with a female lead. But if the team had a woman, then no – they were more likely to work on male-fronted stories.
[9:11] This is likely a result of how people felt the need to respond in the face of widespread social pressure.
[9:39] All-male teams tended to develop female characters that conformed to traditional gender stereotypes.
[10:53] Ok, so #MeToo changed Hollywood; what does that mean for other industries? Well, to really understand how social movements can spur innovation, let’s look also at the medical device industry.
[12:18] Social movements let industries capitalize on a need for change that would have otherwise been too expensive or unprofitable before.
[14:16] But when the movement wanes, momentum of the change also falters.
[14:38] But for advocates, the long game is probably worth it: “The literature shows that when you actually have more female talent in a particular field, especially if those talent could use that opportunity to gain experience and gain track record…then we may actually sustain more longer run change.”
Megan Haynes: A warning to listeners: This episode briefly discusses sexual assault and violence against women. If this is uncomfortable for you, please feel free to skip ahead to 2:35, after the introduction, where the focus will return to the research and business implications.
It’s been almost a decade since The New York Times released a bombshell report about widespread abuse against women in the upper echelon of Hollywood.
In 2017, Harvey Weinstein, then a respected producer, was accused of multiple accounts of sexual assault against a myriad of women in the film and television industry.
Since the news broke, more than 80 women have come forward to detail their abuse at Weinstein’s hands, and online, a social movement swelled. Women took to Twitter to share their own stories of abuse under the hashtag “MeToo.”
Through the coverage and subsequent movement, it became apparent that many others in Hollywood — from film and TV executives to other producers to writers and actors — were not just aware of the abuse by Weinstein and others; in many cases, they were also complicit.
Other prominent actors and producers were called out for abusive behaviour towards men and women. Some, like Bill Cosby, went to jail for their actions. Others, like Kevin Spacey, were found not guilty in court. MeToo even spread to industries outside of Hollywood, though perhaps not as effectively. And in the film and TV world, there was a definite change.
Hong Luo: Probably about a year after MeToo happened, I started to notice a lot of commentary coming out about the movement — both about the positives of the movement, as well as potential downsides. And I remember thinking to myself, I do know how to work with data in Hollywood from prior research, and perhaps I can say something using data systematically and add some evidence to the conversation.
My name is Hong Luo. I’m an associate professor in the strategic management area of Rotman, as well as the economics department. Broadly speaking, my work is about understanding individuals as well as firms, innovation behaviour, and the central theme of my research is to understand the role of the market-level environment and how that affects such behaviour.
MH: Hong wanted to learn more about how a market-wide social movement like #MeToo would actually influence innovation and change.
How did it reshape the product Hollywood made — namely, movies and TV shows?
And what could it tell us about innovation in times of profound upheaval and crisis?
Welcome to Executive Summary. I’m your host, Megan Haynes, editor of the Rotman Insights Hub.
Musical interlude
MH: Just one of the top 10 grossing movies in 2017 was directed by a woman — Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman — and none of them were written by women.
According to the Celluloid Ceiling report out of San Diego State University, a semi-annual tracking of behind-the-scenes talent in Hollywood, in 2017 women made up just 11 per cent of writers and directors.
Gender equality in Hollywood has been a longstanding issue, and over the past few decades, efforts to improve gender balance both on screen and behind the scenes have seen mixed results. But experts say one of the reasons the widespread sexual abuse in the industry went unreported for so long is the lack of gender diversity on creative teams.
And #MeToo offered Hong an interesting opportunity to measure whether large-scale social pressure could influence change in any meaningful way.
HL: The first-order question that we asked is whether the #MeToo movement has led to more working opportunities for female talent, and in particular, female writers in Hollywood. And we just thought the movement, by its magnitude and what it revealed, could have had an impact on the motivation for decision-makers to make change.
MH: To study this, Hong and Laurina Zhang, an associate professor at Boston University, compared movie teams in the two and a half years leading up to 2017 with those in the two years after the #MeToo movement.
More specifically, they looked at how the likelihood of working with female writers changed among producers who had previously worked with Harvey Weinstein, compared to the change among production teams that had no prior relationship with Weinstein. Just noting here — they looked at movie projects that were in very early development. Essentially, a producer had purchased the script and signed some contracts with writers, but the film might not necessarily get to theatres in the end.
And the results were pretty startling.
HL: What we find is that, relative to those non-associated producers, those producers who are associated with Harvey Weinstein are about nine percentage points more likely to work with female writers after MeToo than before.
MH: Basically, after the #MeToo movement, all productions saw a spike in women in writer roles.
But producers who had some past affiliation with Weinstein — specifically, having worked on a movie with him in the past — were far more likely to buy a script from a female writer or hire female talent into the writers’ room than those with no affiliation with Weinstein whatsoever.
So what drove the behaviour change?
HL: The way we hypothesize it, it could be twofold. One is motivated by deep literature in sociology around the notion of stigma by association — the idea that birds of a feather flock together. If you had worked with Harvey Weinstein, people could perceive you to share similar traits or be more tolerant of misconduct and toxic culture, and that’s a reputation we don’t want to have.
MH: Bringing more female talent into the room might be a way of removing or mitigating the taint by association.
HL: But I don’t think that’s the only reason. I think that many people in Hollywood, especially gatekeepers like producers, may have other reasons beyond the necessity to mitigate risk to enact change. It could be because the movement itself really highlighted some of the phenomena they were somewhat aware of, but not aware of the depth of. Or the sudden publicity makes them more alert, more cognizant of these issues and their consequences. They may feel a certain kind of guilt for not having done enough before. They may want to make change to the extent they can because they’re more aware of these problems, feel more intrinsically motivated to do something about it, or feel more empowered to act.
MH: And did the changes to the writers’ room make a difference to success?
HL: What we actually see is that projects developed by teams including women are more likely to be released in theatres. If we treat that as a proxy for success, it’s more likely to be successful after #MeToo than before.
Musical interlude
MH: So more women were behind the scenes on movie sets. The next question was: did that result in more women on camera?
According to San Diego State University, in 2017 women comprised just 24 per cent of leading character roles on film — a two per cent decline from the previous year.
The university found that when the creative team had at least one woman, women made up 45 per cent of protagonists. Without a woman on the creative team, women accounted for just 20 per cent of roles. Essentially, having a woman as a director or writer is far more likely to result in a female lead character.
The caveat here is that even with female talent behind the camera, major Hollywood studios were generally more likely to make movies featuring just male leads.
HL: In our second project, what we want to look at is whether we actually observe more projects that are more female-oriented — for example, that feature primarily female protagonists.
MH: And here’s where things get interesting. Using the same methodology as the first study, Hong and her colleague looked at films with female protagonists before and after #MeToo, broken down by teams with an association with Weinstein and those without.
HL: If everybody on the team is men, what we observe is that after #MeToo, the team is actually more likely to develop female protagonist stories. But if we look at teams that include at least one woman, the opposite happened — meaning they’re actually more likely to develop male protagonist projects after MeToo relative to before. That sharp contrast is what we find quite interesting.
MH: On the reasoning behind the shift, Hong is cautious. She doesn’t specifically study gender diversity in the workplace, and it really is a complex and sociologically nuanced topic.
But generally, when faced with the social pressure of MeToo, there are two ways to respond to such a widescale social movement. One is to hire more female talent. The other is to develop more female-led stories.
If they didn’t hire more female talent, then that really only leaves the on-screen roles.
What’s also noteworthy is that teams with associations with Harvey Weinstein changed the types of female characters they developed, compared to teams with no association with Weinstein.
HL: Regardless of the gender composition of the team, female protagonist stories developed after #MeToo by Weinstein-associated teams are, on average, less in concordance with traditional gender stereotypes than those female protagonist stories developed by non-associated teams.
MH: In this case, stereotyping isn’t the buxom siren or the dowdy nanny. It’s looking at the generally positive traits associated with certain genders — things like assertiveness and ambition for men, caring and compassion for women. Weinstein-associated teams were less likely to create characters that displayed those characteristics than teams that weren’t.
HL: These are relatively conforming to traditional ideas of female norms versus male norms, which as a result has huge implications for what society traditionally thinks are roles or jobs suitable for women versus men.
Musical interlude
MH: Despite its outsized cultural influence, Hollywood is a very niche industry.
What happens there tends to get a lot more publicity than, say, in construction or banking. So it’s worth asking whether a social movement or strong external pressure would have the same impact on other industries as it did with MeToo and Hollywood.
Well, to start, let’s go back to Hong’s other world of research: innovation around risk, which she studies alongside her Rotman colleague Alberto Galasso.
HL: In the medical device industry, what we look at is how consumer perceptions of risk — which are often generated by major accidents — suddenly revise everybody’s notion of how safe a particular kind of product is, and how that may shape medical device producers’ innovation behaviour. What kind of devices do they design now? What kind of safety features do they put in?
MH: We’ve talked about this before on the show in the context of AI, but I’ll toss in a reminder here.
To get something to market quickly, you often have to sacrifice safety features. To get something to market safely, sometimes you sacrifice speed. And when you have lots of competition, the desire to get something out quickly and beat the market can result in a less safe product.
But in the world of medicine, when someone gets really sick because of a new drug, suddenly there’s external pressure — be it in the form of regulation or public opinion — to address that safety issue. And when the wave is big enough…
HL: There is this market shift in demand for safety, for change, for greater improvement. This demand shift can actually present promising or profitable opportunities for different kinds of innovation strategies. It could drive demand for safety features that were not as profitable before, or drive profitability or support from everybody in the industry, including end consumers, for certain kinds of projects.
But a deeper layer relates to the notion of coordination. If a single firm wants to provide safety features or make change in terms of gender representation on a team, it may not be enough if other parties aren’t on the same page. If I’m the only one who wants to make a change but can’t get support from others, you can’t coordinate behaviour toward a certain direction. That’s why when you have a massive shock like the MeToo movement, or major medical accidents that raise awareness across the board, it can actually solve coordination issues.
MH: Like big accidents in the medical world, big social movements have the unintended benefit of forcing companies to think through innovations and changes that might not have been profitable before.
If suddenly the entire industry has to focus on addressing the root cause of the issue — say greenhouse gas emissions in your supply chain, worker safety in your factory, or gender diversity on your teams — it becomes more palatable to swallow the costs otherwise associated with change.
But alas, consumer memories are short, and as we’ve seen in recent months, there has been pushback against some of the biggest social movements of the past decade.
HL: If the attention to the movement or the intensity of the movement starts to wane, then we may expect the motivational effect to fade as well.
MH: So for groups pushing for change, keeping that momentum and pressure on organizations is really important — even if it’s incredibly difficult.
And Hong reminds us not to lose hope. Systemic change, like movie development, is slow. In 2024, three of the top-grossing films had at least four women in director and writer roles — more than triple the number in 2017.
The Celluloid Ceiling report found that in 2024, women accounted for 20 per cent of writers and 16 per cent of directors — an improvement over 2017, for sure. Change can build on change, even in the absence of some social pressure.
HL: The literature shows that when you actually have more female talent in a particular field — especially if some of that talent can use the opportunity to gain experience and build a track record, and move into decision-making positions — then we may sustain change beyond the short-term effects of the #MeToo movement. That alone, hopefully, will help sustain longer-run change.
Outro
MH: This has been Rotman Executive Summary, a podcast bringing you the latest insights and innovative thinking from Canada’s leading business school. Special thanks to associate professor Hong Luo.
Join us next month as we chat with professor Lisa Kramer about how seasonal changes can derail your investment strategies.
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This episode was written and produced by Megan Haynes, recorded by Dan Mazzotta, and edited by Avery Moore Kloss.
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