I’ll be honest, the headline is a bit misleading – on purpose. When I sat down to write this piece, I expected to be answering the question: are women in production fighting to be taken seriously? Twenty-two years into a career in production across the GCC, I assumed I would be telling you about the barriers, the glass ceilings, and the battles fought and only half-won. Instead, the more honestly I examined our industry, the clearer it became that this is not the story I thought I would be telling.
Because here is the truth: women don’t merely have a seat at the table in Middle East production. We are the table. Almost 70 per cent of the workforce in a typical production house here is female, and roughly 80 per cent of producers across the region are women. We are not the exception in this industry. We are the majority, running the sets, managing the budgets, and carrying the deadlines on our shoulders.
What makes this even more compelling is who we are doing it for. Our clients remain overwhelmingly male, largely Arab men, and yet they entrust us with their budgets, their brands, their craft and their deadlines without a second thought. Whether that trust is conscious or instinctive is up for debate, but one thing isn’t: they know these are safe hands.
Why? My own theory, drawn from two decades on set, is this: women tend to be exceptional multitaskers – resilient under pressure, instinctively organised and hospitable by nature. It is already demanding enough to work long hours in a job defined by unpredictability, surrounded by strangers, without also being treated ungraciously.
“There is a strange kind of equality in how disrespect gets distributed. ”
We treat our sets the way we treat our homes: full of warmth, generosity and care. Good production work, needless to say, tends to follow. None of this is to say men can’t produce brilliantly. My longtime producing partner is proof of that, one of the best in the business. He’s just never quite grasped why a full spread of food matters as much as a full shot list. That combination, more than anything else, is why women excel here.
I want to be equally honest about respect, because it would be easy to reach for a more dramatic narrative. When I started out, young and inexperienced, I was thrown into a world in which men vastly outnumbered women. I was challenged by rivals who had been in the industry long before me and, in two instances, was the target of deliberate, carefully orchestrated sabotage on my own shoots.
But looking back with a clear head, none of it was ever about my gender; it was about competition and the insecurity that competition breeds. Clients, agencies and brands have always worked with our female-majority production teams with genuine respect for our opinions, our instincts and our voice. They rely on us for campaigns that can make or break a creative director’s or a marketer’s career.
Yes, disrespect exists in this industry, but it stems from the insecurity of some powerful men and women alike, and is never directed specifically at our gender. If anything, there is a strange kind of equality in how disrespect gets distributed.
So where is the real gap? It sits at the top. Look around and you will still find far fewer production houses founded and led by women than the numbers on set would suggest. Most female producers rise to executive producer level, and then the journey stops. They rarely take the leap into starting their own companies. I don’t believe…