Netflix recently announced that its period romance Bridgerton broke all previous viewership records for the streamer. When the first part of season 3 dropped in May, it garnered 45 million views in its first weekend and is currently riding high on top of the streaming charts with almost 800 million views. And it’s not unsurprising, given the success of the previous 2 seasons of the pitch-perfect “ballgowns and bonking” escapism. 

One of the secrets of Bridgerton’s success is its unashamed catering to the female viewer, both in plot and characterisation, but most refreshingly in terms of the “female gaze” in its many love scenes. Female pleasure and male bodies are far more in focus than the usual bouncing breasts of many similar shows which have come before it (excuse the pun).

With a classic “friends to lovers” romance trope (Penelope Featherington finally the eye and heart of her childhood love Colin Bridgerton) as its core story, this season caters even more strongly to that female-skewed viewership. Bolstered with Pen’s “blooming wallflower” evolution (with a classic make-over montage) and – perhaps most significantly – Colin as the most modern of the Bridgerton brothers as a romantic lead (with consent being key to his romantic moves) it manages to tick many female viewers fantasy wish list with ease.

These details may seem trite and unimportant to some, but their existence in Bridgerton shows a writer who truly understands what women (specifically, women who read romance novels) want to see. And this too is not surprising, given the creatives behind Bridgerton.

Created and produced by Shonda Rhimes’ production company Shondaland, based on books by Julia Quinn, and currently show-run by Jess Brownwell, Bridgerton has a huge number of women with their fingers in its pie. So with this winning formula, it’s alarming to know that the number of women involved behind the scenes in UK TV is not growing, but actually declining.

The Sixth Commandment BBC One.

With Sarah Phelps winning Best Drama for her incredible Sixth Commandment, Kat Adler for both Emerging Talent Fiction and Scripted Comedy (for Such Brave Girls), and Julia Knowles receiving multiple nominations as an entertainment director at this year’s TV BAFTAS, you would be forgiven for thinking that women have won the fight for equality. Yet between 2016 and 2022, the amount of female writers contributing to UK TV declined by 10%, and the number of female directors fell by around 4%. Even with the number of women in seats of power in UK television – Charlotte Moore as Chief Content Officer at the BBC and Polly Hill as Head of Drama at ITV – it seems women’s voices struggle to be heard.

The reasons for this are no doubt complex. It’s not a question of desire – BFI research shows that there are a much higher proportion of female students of screenwriting than there are professional screenwriters. And it certainly isn’t a question of talent, as the BAFTAs prove. The problem seems to lie elsewhere in the chain of command, but whatever the cause, the end result is we all – as audiences – miss out, particularly when we acknowledge how many of the UK’s most iconic and culturally impactful TV shows and characters have come from female writers. 

I May Destroy You broke new ground in 2020 with Michaela Coel’s unflinching look at abuse.

Carla Lane changed the face of British sitcoms, and the role of women in them, breaking free of the “dolly bird” mould with The Liver Birds, and the traditional housewife in Butterflies. 

Lynda La Plante revolutionised the place of women in crime dramas from Widows to – possibly the greatest TV show of all time – Prime Suspect, giving us some of the most memorable and impressive female characters in all of television.

Kay Mellor brought us the ground-breaking look at sex workers in Band of Gold, and wrote the play-book for moving, a richly-layered family drama from Brookside to Fat Friends.

In more recent years, Sally Wainwright has had hit after hit of audience-grabbing dramas from Last Tango in Halifax to Happy Valley, and trailblazed the stories of queer women in mainstream television with Tipping the Velvet and Gentleman Jack.

And then there are the creators who have shaped TV in partnership with others – women like Julia Smith, half of the team who created Eastenders; Julie Gardiner, one of the pivotal producers behind the Doctor Who reboot; Sylvia Anderson, who was a multifaceted key player in all of her husband Gerry Anderson’s puppet creations. And children’s TV was forever changed when Biddy Baxter led the development team for, and eventually edited, Blue Peter for over 20 years.

Further afield, one of the most important figures in TV history was Lucille Ball – who went from TV’s first lady of comedy to becoming the first woman to run a major television studio, responsible for creating (and not cancelling) Star Trek.

Sarah Lancashire in Julia from HBO Max

The misogyny that held women like Ball back in an era when women were still fighting for basic rights is obvious and has been explored in shows from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to recent delight Julia. It was outright and open and unmistakable, but the barriers now – though less overt – are still rooted in the same prejudice. Expressions of misogyny and sexism can come in many forms. It’s not simply about men being hired over women. It’s also about sexual harassment, undermining, dismissiveness, stereotyping and theft, when women are involved.

Accusations abound about TV showrunners and auteurs who use female creatives to help them build a vision for a show, write first drafts, or use their skills in some other way, and then push them out of the narrative when the show is a hit. Last year the ultimately disastrous The Idol by Sam Levison came under the spotlight when director Amy Seimetz was allegedly pushed out when the show was recrafted and remodelled to move away from the “female perspective” it originally carried.

Jodie Foster in True Detective: Night Country which was run by female showrunner Issa López

Yet even when TV creators intend to produce output with a “female perspective”, the vision can be a truly eye-opening insight into how male writers view women. Jodie Foster recently told Hollywood Reporter about her shock at how many parts she is offered which are rape victims – historically or as part of the plot. It’s seen as the “go to” motivation for “strong, female characters” and it’s a symptom of the kind of writing we see far too often from male writers.

It’s not that male writers can’t write women and girls – there are some brilliant creatives who did it with ease. The problem is that far too often the writing falls back on lazy stereotypes that come from men looking into the lives of women from the outside, instead of lived experience. Their idea of what women feel, do, and go through, lacks nuance because too many male writers are stuck in archetypes of womanhood which are self-perpetuated in the media.

The “manic pixie dream girl”, the “strong black woman”, the “martyr”, the “femme fatale” are all stereotypical female characters which exist in a post-feminism era, and which are still rolled out by writers today – even ones who think themselves forward-thinking (Buffy creator Joss Whedon is a prime example). These male writers are falling into the same traps of male writers before them and perpetuating them for the next generation of writers coming after them. They are creating female characters who are tough in the ways men imagine women to be tough, sexy in the way men want women to be sexy, or invisible if they are the kind of women men just don’t see. They lack the nuance and variety of real women, and too often are not allowed the same flaws or failings of male characters around them. And far too often these women are defined by sexual trauma, or their relationship to men, or – most often – both. 

Issa López showrunner, writer and director of True Detective: Night Country.

Jodie Foster’s character in True Detective season 4 was the perfect example of the nuanced character that is more likely to come from a female writer. Issa López created a detective with a background trauma which was not connected to her sexuality, and instead her sexuality was the kind far more often associated with the grizzled, troubled male detectives we are used to seeing on our screens. Danvers was allowed to be cold and rude and detached, without it being due to sexual assault. Her detective partner, Navarro (Kali Reis), too had a complex identity that was shaped not by men in her life but by her family relationships, mental health issues, and her connection to her Native roots.

And that is the most disturbing issue interwoven with the lack of female voices in TV – the lack of women of colour. Female writers of colour are vanishingly rare, in UK television particularly. In 2020, fewer than 2% of UK TV writers of all genders were Black, despite the massive worldwide success of writers like Michaela Cole and Steven Knight. 

The obstacles for female writers just seem never-ending – from sexual harassment to lack of support during pregnancy and with child care – and for women of colour those obstacles are higher and more frequent. We must find a way to clear the path and bring more women of every ethnicity and identity to the table and onto primetime television.

It is vitally important that there is a diversity of voices even within the category of “female creatives” for exactly the same reason that it’s important to have female voices in the first place. Lived experience is the number one key for writing authentic, meaningful stories, and there are as many lived experiences of womanhood as there are women. A young black woman from South London will have a very different experience of womanhood to an old white woman from South Wales. A trans woman who has transitioned later in life will have a different experience of womanhood to a teenage mother. There are so many voices and stories of womanhood that deserve and need to be told, and the fewer women there are overall, the less likely those differing female voices are to be heard as we all fight for the same slice of the TV pie.