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Gender-Balanced Hiring Falls Among TV’s Top 100 Series, ReFrame and WIF Report Finds

Gender-balanced hiring on television’s most popular series dipped during the 2025-2026 season, according to ReFrame’s latest annual report, produced in collaboration with WIF.

Forty-two of the season’s top 100 series received the ReFrame Stamp, the organization’s designation for gender-balanced productions. That marks a decline of three percent from the year before.

The findings are likely to reinforce concerns that progress on screen and behind the camera is not guaranteed, especially as the entertainment industry recalibrates after a period of rapid expansion and contraction. ReFrame, founded by the Sundance Institute and WIF in 2017, designed the ReFrame Stamp to recognize productions that meet specific benchmarks for hiring women, nonbinary people and trans people in key roles.

“It confirms what I think a lot of people are witnessing, experiencing, which is that we are backsliding on gender balance,” WIF CEO Kirsten Schaffer said in an interview. “We think we’ve made it relatively easy to get and so the fact that the numbers are moving backward rather than forwards is really an issue. We’re looking for forward progress.”

Schaffer stressed that the industry’s reduced output does not account for the decline. “Even though there are fewer television shows being made right now across the industry, this is based on percentages, so the percentages should still stay there,” she added.

The ReFrame Stamp is awarded to TV productions that hire sufficient numbers of women or nonbinary or trans people in significant roles. Those roles include showrunner, lead actor, co-lead actor, director, and various heads of department. Eligibility is determined through a point system, allowing productions to qualify based on a combination of hires rather than one standout appointment.

Despite that flexibility, the 2025-2026 season produced a clear step backward in several important categories.

Only 39 women or nonbinary or trans people played lead roles in the season’s top series, the lowest number in seven years. In the previous television season, that figure was 44. Representation of women of color and nonbinary and trans people of color in co-lead roles also decreased. In the 2024-2025 season, 55 percent of the most popular series featured at least one woman of color or nonbinary or trans person of color in a crucial supporting role. This latest season, only 47 percent did.

Behind the camera, the report painted a mixed picture. The number of showrunners who are women or nonbinary or trans people ticked up slightly, from 29 in the previous season to 31 in the latest season — but that still demonstrates how underrepresented those groups remain in the role. Writers saw a small gain: the number of series with at least half of their episodes written by women or nonbinary people rose from 49 to 51. Directors, however, moved in the opposite direction, with the number of series that had at least half of their episodes directed by women or nonbinary people dropping from 38 to 32.

Crew departments were also uneven. Representation for first assistant directors dipped by seven percent, production designers by four percent, and directors of photography by three percent. On a more positive note, representation rose for stunt coordinators by 12 percent, composers by two percent, and visual effects supervisors by three percent.

As ReFrame has previously reported, having a woman showrunner is highly predictive of a gender-balanced series. That correlation continued this year, though it weakened slightly. Among the series that received the Stamp in the 2025-2026 season, 87 percent had a woman showrunner. In the previous season, that figure was nearly 93 percent.

The report also suggests that gender-balanced productions can be a smart bet for networks and streamers. Of the 27 first-season series that received the Stamp, 24 — or 89 percent — were renewed. That compares favorably with the 45 first-season series that did not receive the Stamp, 38 of which, or 84 percent, were renewed. Eleven shows were cancelled during the 2024-2025 television season: four had received the Stamp, and seven had not.

Schaffer and ReFrame have long presented the Stamp as both a recognition and an incentive. By identifying shows that meet the benchmark, the program gives audiences, executives, and creators a transparent way to see which productions are making inclusion a priority. The latest numbers, Schaffer suggested, should be a call to action rather than a signal that the problem has been solved.

This year’s class of ReFrame Stamp recipients includes both brand-new shows and established favorites, spanning broadcast networks, cable, and streaming platforms. The list includes Netflix hits such as “Wednesday,” “The Diplomat,” and “Ginny & Georgia,” HBO titles such as “Euphoria” and “The Gilded Age,” and Amazon Prime Video series such as “Fallout,” “The Boys,” and “The Summer I Turned Pretty.” The full list of recipients of ReFrame’s Stamp from the 2025-2026 television season follows: