Let's face it: Progress toward gender equality, on TV and in the boardrooms of broadcasters, has been slow. The most recent "Boxed In" study from the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film, which looks at female talent in the U.S. industry, found that only 39 percent of all speaking characters on shows across all platforms were women and that females made up just 27 percent of all individuals working behind the scenes.
No equivalent figures exist for the international TV business, but you can be sure that outside the U.S, it's even worse. For whole regions of the world, the industry remains almost entirely an old boys club. But chipping away at the status quo are these 20 luminaries selected by THR for its annual list of the world's most powerful women in global TV. From the first female boss of the Australian Broadcasting Corp. to the heads of Europe's biggest channel group and its largest production company to a 19-year-old inspiring young girls across Europe and South America, they are, slowly, changing what the world watches and how women, from Berlin to Beijing, are seen.
Additional reporting by Ariston Anderson, Nyay Bhushan, Pip Bulbeck, Rhonda Richford, and Pamela Rolfe
