Women Come Into Their Own in Digital Era

One area of animation has been open to women from its very inception: the digital arena. “From the mid-1980s to now, it’s been a tremendous change in animation, especially in technology,” says Bonne Radford, head of animation for DreamWorks. “It was an equal playing field at the start.”

Even so, Sharon Calahan, who has been working in computer-generated imagery since the mid-1980s, says that while the doors may have been open, it took several years for women to enter. “You’d go to [the graphics arts trade show] Siggraph [in the ‘80s] and there’d be one woman for every hundred men,” says Calahan, who served as director of photography for the Pixar/Disney features “A Bug’s Life” and “Toy Story 2.” “Times have definitely changed since I’ve been in the industry.”

While the ranks of women in digital animation are growing, they do not appear to be expanding beyond the levels of women in traditional animation, which is loosely estimated at between 30% and 40%. “As far as I can see, it’s about the same between traditional and digital,” says Sue Campbell, a character animator for Industrial Light & Magic. What’s more, the level of women in the field tends not to be evenly distributed across all departments. “Even now at Pixar there aren’t any women in the story department,” says animator Tasha Wedeen. “They asked if I wanted to be in story, but that wasn’t really something I was interested in, so it’s not because they don’t want women in the story department.”

Top positions still tend to be predominantly male, although “as you get down into the computer and see the people actually designing and working and building sets in the computer, there’s many more women,” according to Kendal Cronkhite, production designer for the DreamWorks/Pacific Data Images feature “Tusker.” About one-third to one-half of the artists who work on the computer at Pacific Data Images, she says, are women.

But if any area of the digital realm is lagging behind in terms of gender equality, it is the special effects field. Ellen Poon is ILM’s only visual effects supervisor and one of the only female effects supervisors in the industry. “What I’ve found is sometimes a director or producer will say, ‘Well, maybe we should go for a different [effects house] because they have a male lead over there,’ ” says Poon. “You get the technophobia people who believe that only men understand technical terms and women don’t, and we definitely have to break this myth.”