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Female Collaborations
Does the collaboration of female scriptwriters enrich the storylines with socially conscious themes and increase the likelihood of their script being completed and successfully pitched?
Why do we need to talk about this?
The independent report commissioned by The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) and Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) revealed that 16% of all working screenwriters in the film are female, and the percentage of television episodes written by women stands at 28% (Kreager & Follows, 2018). The report states that the beginning of the female writers’ career poses the most significant relative difficulty in progressing to further films. Additionally, Kreager and Follows argued that the last decade did not show marked improvement in female representation. They suggested that if more films and programmes written by female writers are to be made, a coordinated effort is required.
In a more recent blog post, the report author Stephen Follows (2022) analyses the screenwriting teams based on gender. 81% of the screenwriting teams were men, 10% were women, and the remaining teams were of mixed gender.
Four Parts of the Project
Part I:
Qualitative analysis of ten female scriptwriting duets' working styles.
Scriptwriters to meet the following criteria:
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Identified as female prior to the start of collaboration
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With at least one feature film script written individually
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Writing a feature film script
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Writing as a duet
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Working in the UK and writing in English
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Writing for English speaking audience
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With none of their work for the screen being produced before the start of their collaboration
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Can be represented by an agent
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Aim to collaborate on one project for no more than 12 months
Element One: Quarterly interviews will be conducted using a standardised questionnaire, short 1:2 meetings, and a 1:1 interview with each duet member.
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​Element Two: Interviews with female scriptwriters who collaborate(d) with other females to create film scripts.
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Part II:
Qualitative analysis of ten female scriptwriting duets' working outcomes.
Element One: Comparative study of loglines (produced collaboratively) and outlines (prepared separately) against a completed film script. Qualitative scoring of the presence of the following themes: empowerment and self-discovery, female relationships, challenging social norms, and social commentary.
Element Two: Ten industry professionals will review the three outlines (without knowing which is the final one) and select the one with the highest market interest probability. The outlines will be standardised in their formatting, without revealing the name of the creator, and will be presented to the reviewers in a randomised order (within the range of three).
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Part III:
Critical analysis,
incorporating feedback from industry professionals.
Part IV:
Development of a feature film script on how female writers collaborate and support each other (or not)
to break into the industry.
Timeline
2025 - 2026
September 2025 - March 2026:
Ethics approval. Selecting an existing questionnaire or generating a standardised questionnaire, securing data storage. Sourcing participants.
March - April 2026:
Logline and outline exercises with the duets.
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2026 - 2027
May 2026 - March 2027:
Quarterly meetings with the writer duets. Interviews with female scriptwriters.
April - September 2027:
Qualitative analysis of the findings and writing an academic essay.
Qualitative assessment of the first and final outlines by industry professionals.
2027 - 2028
October 2027- September 2028:
Developing a feature script about two female scriptwriting collaborations, informed by the dynamics and outcomes of female collaborations from the sample group.
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