Women Behind the Scenes: A Data-Driven Approach to Analyse Female Labour in Italian Television

The aim of this work is analysing women’s employment in key behind-the-scenes jobs in Italian TV crime dramas distributed from Fall 2015 to Summer 2022. This research has a two-fold objective: first, understanding female employment in the Italian television sector through the lens of crime dramas (micro-level); second, and more generally, setting an analysis model that can be replicated with respect to other genres, periods, countries or typology of datasets (macro-level). Since the sample analysis we conducted revealed data and trends consistent with analyses of larger datasets, we can argue that the original findings obtained may extend beyond the boundaries of the crime genre. Despite some positive trends, data about female employment in Italian television production show a more unbalanced scenario with stronger gender inequalities compared to both European averages for TV fiction and the Italian film sector.