Caring, collaboration, confidence and constraint in the working lives of older women filmmakers in the UK

Cobb, Shelley and Williams, Linda R. (2023) Caring, collaboration, confidence and constraint in the working lives of older women filmmakers in the UK. In, Liddy, Susan (ed.) Women, Ageing and the Screen Industries: ‘Falling off a cliff’. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 61-76. (doi:10.1007/978-3-031-18385-0_4).

Abstract

What circumstances sustain and constrain women working in the UK film and TV industries? What support and conditions enable women to maintain careers through to a retirement age equivalent to that their male counterparts might attain? These questions, and a range of diverse answers, developed and grew as the authors of this chapter undertook qualitative research focused on a cluster of interviews which formed part of the work for the project Calling the Shots: Women in the contemporary UK film industry 2000-2015. It has become clear that the study of older workers in the UK screen industries is vastly under-researched and that the study of older women workers is an even a larger gap in the field. This chapter takes initial steps in filling this gap through an analysis of the way some women have spoken of their experiences of being a filmmaker during the mid and later life stages. We begin with the most common difficulty older women face - caring responsibilities – and consider how caring for both parents and children is a gendered pressure specific to middle-age that they felt was largely overlooked. Our subjects are largely career-established, so the rest of the chapter is about the ways they talked about building, navigating and sustaining that success. We begin with the collaborations and networks with other women that these interviewees have drawn on throughout their careers and then turn to the individual experience of finding one’s confidence that those most successful women who build current work on long careers come to feel and recognize when past the age of 50. We conclude with some questions and thoughts about future research on those women who are no longer able to find work the film industry by late-career and do not have voices in our study.

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Contributors

Author: Shelley Cobb

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