Unequal Opportunities: Gender Inequities and Precarious Diversity in the 1970s US Television Industry

This article examines the precarity of labor for women working in US broadcast television during the long 1970s, focusing on interventions by government agencies, trade unions, and individual writers and producers, with a particular focus on the Writers Guild of America (WGA) 1974 Women's Committee Report, the first major statistical survey to track the representation of women as creatives within American television. This article puts qualitative and quantitative data in direct conversation: where one captures the nuances of personal experience and the other highlights the extent of inequality, together they help fill gaps in understanding the long history of struggles for equity in media production.