LOS ANGELES – When Greta Gerwig did not receive an Oscar nomination in January for best director for Barbie, despite the film’s nod for best picture and its status as a global box office phenomenon, the news revived scrutiny over gender diversity among the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ membership.

The directors’ branch, which chooses the five nominees for that Oscar category, is 25 per cent female. Overall, 34 per cent of the academy’s more than 10,000 members are women.

“The academy, like our industry, should reflect the world in which we live,” said Mr David Heyman, a producer of Barbie.

“The fact that it doesn’t is just wrong.”

In 2016, the academy – reacting to the #OscarsSoWhite backlash after two straight years of all-white acting nominees – announced its A2020 initiative, meant to double the number of women and people of colour among its membership within five years.

In June 2020, it said it had achieved those goals.

Since then, however, the percentage of women in the academy has grown by 1 percentage point, to 34 per cent.

Academy members may choose not to identify as a man or a woman. Other choices include “agender,” “non-binary,” “other”, “prefer to self-describe” and “prefer not to say”.

The percentage of people of colour has dropped 1 percentage point, to 18 per cent.

The academy is an invitation-only non-profit that represents acceptance into the highest echelon of the film industry.

While membership requirements differ for each of its 18 branches, people must be sponsored by two members of the branch they are wishing to join. Oscar nominees are automatically considered for membership.

In an effort to maintain its roughly 10,000-member size, the academy has reduced the number of people it has admitted annually in recent years, from a high of 928 in 2018 to an average of 397 a year since 2020.

In an interview, Ms Meredith Shea, the academy’s chief membership, impact and industry officer, said she was not satisfied with the current make-up of the membership, but added that the executive committee of each branch was “still looking at increasing representation across the board”.

“I’m taking a new look at what we need to do and the steps that need to be taken,” Ms Shea said.

“There are 18 different branches that reflect different industries. So it’s looking at what you need to do in visual effects – are we creating a pipeline programme there? What’s happening in costume and make-up is not what’s happening in some of our other disciplines.

“Nothing is slowing, nothing is stopping… It’s just making sure that we’re doing this right and holistically, because it’s never going to be one size fits all.”

The directors’ branch is led by two women, film-makers Ava DuVernay and Susanne Bier. Only eight women have ever been nominated for best director, including Jane Campion twice and Justine Triet in 2024.

Gerwig is one of them, having been recognised for Lady Bird in 2017. Three women have won the award: Campion, Kathryn Bigelow and Chloe Zhao. Two women have been nominated in the same year just once: Zhao and Emerald Fennell in 2021.

The academy has noted that, for the first time, three films nominated for best picture in 2024 were directed by women: Barbie, Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall and Past Lives, which was directed by Celine Song.

And in each of the past five years, at least one best picture nominee has been directed by a woman.

Barbie received eight nominations overall, including a nod for Gerwig and Noah Baumbach in the best adapted screenplay category.

Some branches – make-up and hair, casting directors, and costume designers – are dominated by women. The three that feature the fewest women are sound (15 per cent), visual effects (12 per cent) and cinematographers (11 per cent).

Still, some advocates for better opportunities for women in the entertainment industry say that while they would like to see improved gender representation in the academy, it is operating in a broader ecosystem.

“We want the academy to get to parity, but the academy reflects the industry,” said Ms Kirsten Schaffer, the chief executive of Women in Film, a non-profit advocacy group.

In a report released in February, the University of Southern California’s (USC) Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that the number of women and women of colour in starring or co-starring roles in the top 100 box office films in 2023 was the lowest since 2014.

And despite the $1.4 billion (S$1.87 billion) taken in by Barbie at the global box office, only 16 per cent of the directors of the 250 top-grossing films for 2023 were women, according to a study by Dr Martha M. Lauzen, the founder and executive director of the Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.

The USC study found that 30 of the 100 top-grossing films featured women in the starring or co-starring role – “a catastrophic step back for women and girls”, a co-author of the study, Dr Stacy L. Smith, said.

In 2022, 44 such films featured women in a starring or co-starring role.

Ms Schaffer pointed to those statistics as evidence that the academy was in some ways “over-indexing” compared with gender representation in the industry as a whole. The academy’s acting branch, for instance, is 47 per cent female.

What Ms Schaffer would like is gender equality across all branches, specifically the ones in which women are rarely nominated, like cinematography and visual effects.

“The academy and the industry need to put more effort into moving those numbers faster,” she said.

“We cannot wait another 100 years to get to even 30 per cent of cinematographers. We’re inching up so slowly, it’s going to be like 2070 before we get anywhere near parity.” NYTIMES