'Picky' actresses likelier to survive in movie industry

A new study has revealed actresses, who are "picky," are more successful.

The study of Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG) in Germany suggested that actresses need to be pickier than men about with whom they work if they want to survive in the movie industry.

Lead author Mark Lutter said that his research indicates that women in the film industry suffer a lack of access to future career opportunities when they tend to work with people who have collaborated frequently in the past.

For the purposes of his study, Lutter analyzed the career data, including more than a million performances in almost 400,000 movies, of about 100,000 actors and actresses in the American film industry. The data originated from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), which contains details on all films produced since the advent of cinematography, as well as information on all of the actors and actresses involved and the networks within which they operated, in other words, with whom they worked.

Lutter found that when actresses work more often with less connected, more diverse groups featuring people from different social and cultural backgrounds, their career prospects become indistinguishable from those of actors.

The career opportunities for actresses are more likely to dwindle if they work in homogeneous teams, said Lutter, who suspects that women suffer when they are frequently part of homogeneous teams because they might enjoy a much lower degree of active support from mentors than men, and their professional friendship networks might also give them access to fewer contacts in positions of power. This would mean that they are likely excluded from important sources of information about future projects.

Lutter noted that so rather than relying on close circles and personal friendships, women should focus on developing diverse networks of relationships outside their own circle, adding that by and large, they should take a more strategic, considered approach to their decisions concerning future projects if they want their careers to benefit.

The study appears online in the American Sociological Review.