Lifetime Movies Are Mostly Directed By Men

Lifetime's content is unquestionably targeted toward women. Ironically, it doesn't seem like it is equally created by women.

On August 5th, the Hollywood Boys Club tumblr claimed that Lifetime does not hire female directors for their made-for-TV movies at the same rate they hire male directors. The Tumblr examined 79 movies that ran on Lifetime, and only eight of the films they looked at were directed by women. To be fair, many of these films were not created by the Lifetime network, they simply aired on the network at one point or another. However, nowhere near 50 percent of Lifetime original movies have female directors. A Lifetime representative told The Huffington Post that of the 17 films that Lifetime produced in 2012, 28 percent were directed by women.

Lifetime was the #1 basic cable network for original movies in 2012 and attracts millions of viewers. In fact, their highest rated movie, the recently released "Anna Nicole," attracted 3.3 million viewers for its world premiere alone. The failure of the entertainment industry as a whole to hire more female directors -- only 9 percent of the top 250 highest-grossing films in 2012 were directed by women, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film -- is a very real missed opportunity to reach a larger audience.

Posted beneath the "Hollywood Boys Club" tumblr's header is humanitarian Lillian Wald's quote: "The task of organizing human happiness needs the active cooperation of man and woman. It cannot be relegated to one half of the world." These wise words perfectly explain why we need more women behind the camera.

CORRECTION 8/9/13: A previous version of this story cited data from the "Hollywood Boys Club" tumblr, which included many films that were not actually produced by the Lifetime network. The story has been updated to reflect accurate data from Lifetime's 2012 original films.