Film can serve as a cultural filing cabinet for an era. They document our fears, our hopes, and our imaginations at any given time. But are they truly representative of all stories, or of any particular diaspora's ideas of what it is to be human?Hollywood has long come under fire for its lack of female directors. Summon to the forefront of your mind the most prominent and feted directors of our time. It's likely they include Scorsese, Kubrick, Tarantino, Spielberg and Cameron. Do you see a pattern forming? A new study suggests it's a trope that's not just unique to Hollywood.A study commissioned by the professional association Directors UK might have some answers as to why that equilibrium remains un-tipped. The report suggests that only 13.6% of film directors working in the UK are women. It's a depressing statistic that has gone relatively unchanged since 2005, when it stood at 11.3%. In January the BBC ran a story that suggested the 9% of female directors who made up Hollywood's highest grossing films was a figure that had gone unchanged since 1998. It's little wonder that the cinematic endeavours of women, racial minorities, and the LGBT community are often described as "art house" and "lo-fi".

Susanna White , who directed TV adaptations of Bleak House and Jane Eyre, told The Guardian that the results show “hard evidence for a trend that a lot of us have known to be the case for a long time” adding that it was still “shocking to see the extent of this relentless bias laid out in black and white”.