The Hollywood Commission has announced the launch of its second Entertainment Survey, which is designed to give a voice to industry workers while providing the community with crucial insight surrounding the progress made in the past five years toward meaningful systemic change.
The survey is now live at hollywoodentertainmentsurvey.org, and the Hollywood Commission encourages all members of the community to participate in the anonymous questionnaire.
The Hollywood Commission is considered the leading organization working in partnership with 26 of the most important companies, unions and guilds, academies, and talent agencies to end discrimination, harassment, bullying, and abuse in the entertainment industry.
Chaired by Anita Hill and founded by board members Kathleen Kennedy and Nina Shaw, the Hollywood Commission was formed in 2017 to bring together entertainment executives, independent experts, and advisors to take the necessary collective steps toward tackling the culture of abuse and power disparity in the industry.
The second survey, which launched Thursday and is seeking responses from members of the community through Nov. 27, builds on the results of that groundbreaking work. As the Commission and its partner companies offer new resources, initiatives, and training in workplaces throughout the entertainment community, this second survey is designed as a temperature check to specifically identify what progress has been made and where work still needs to be done.
With a goal of 20,000 responses — more than double the participation of the first survey — the new survey will include expanded demographics to ensure representation across all communities; an added focus on employees working in the gaming sector; new questions that measure and assess whether and in what ways people experience colorism; and questions focusing on survivor support and the resources needed for victims of retaliation to get back into the industry.
The survey is open to entertainment workers in television and film, commercials, live theater, music, broadcast news, talent representation, public relations, corporate settings, and the gaming sector, from countries including the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the UK, and countries throughout Asia, Oceania, and the South Pacific.
When the results are tabulated, the Hollywood Commission expects to learn where systems can be improved. Survey responses will focus the Commission’s efforts over the next several years — informing the issues that it will elevate for the community and pinpointing where the organization will prioritize its resources.
“As we seek to determine what systemic progress we have made over the past several years, the second Hollywood Commission Entertainment Survey is more important and in many ways consequential than our first,” Hill said in a statement. “With this new edition, we hope to double the participation of the first survey, which will help provide us with the insight we need as we continue to focus our efforts on our next phase of work. The key to that will be participation — we need to hear directly from all workers about their experiences. We look forward to working with our partners to encourage everyone in the industry to respond and participate, safely and anonymously.
The first-of-its-kind survey, published in 2020, received responses from 9,630 entertainment workers, resulting in eye-opening responses, including:
- 65 percent of respondents didn’t believe that a powerful individual, such as a producer or director, would be held accountable for harassing someone with less power
- Only 28 percent of respondents who had experienced an incident of gender harassment, unwanted sexual attention, or sexual coercion reported it to employers – because they think they won‘t be believed, nothing will happen, or they‘ll be retaliated against.
- While men and women reported gender harassment (demeaning jokes or comments based on gender; sexually crude terms and insults) at similar rates (62 percent of men, 67 percent of women), females experience unwanted sexual attention (42 percent), sexual coercion (20 percent) and sexual assault (5 percent) approximately twice as often as males (22 percent, 9 percent, and 2 percent, respectively).
The results of the new Hollywood Commission survey are expected to be completed and released in early 2023, but you can click here for full reports from the 2019-20 survey.
