Among the achievements and accolades that the photojournalist and director Jessica Dimmock has amassed are three World Press Photo prizes, an Emmy nomination, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and membership in the exclusive international photo agency VII.
In September 2017, Dimmock reached another milestone, when she gave birth to her first child, a daughter, Roxanne. But after taking time to recover and care for her infant, Dimmock fell short of the yearly wages required to keep her health benefits with the Directors Guild of America. In April 2018, she lost her coverage.
Now, some 50 Hollywood women, among them Amy Schumer, Amy Poehler, Ava DuVernay, Greta Gerwig, Kerry Washington and Lena Waithe, have signed Dimmock’s open letter asking the Directors Guild to change its health benefits, which many filmmakers use, and allow new parents more time to meet the minimum earning requirement. For 2020, that is $35,875 — all of which must come from guild directing jobs.
Women, Dimmock wrote in the letter, “are penalized for having children in a way that their male counterparts are not.” She urged the guild to relax the threshold for adoptive parents, too.
Dimmock’s request comes during an awards season in which women have been excluded from the major directing prizes, including the Golden Globes, the Oscars, the BAFTAs in Britain, and the DGA Awards, which will be doled out on Sunday. While women are directing more box office hits than ever, nine of 10 top directing jobs go to men.
Dimmock was still working on “Flint Town,” the 2018 Netflix docu-series about policing in the beleaguered city of Flint, Mich., when her labor pains began.
Roxy, as her parents called her, was born with hip dysplasia, and needed X-rays or sonograms every three weeks or so. Dimmock, whose partner, the director Zackary Canepari, also lost his coverage after caring for Roxanne, wound up moving their daughter to her Cobra plan, at a cost of $1,400 a month.
Speaking from her home in Brooklyn on Wednesday, Dimmock said the scales were already tipped against female directors, especially if they happen to be pregnant or new mothers. Being underrepresented and hired less often than men makes hitting the minimum earnings amount more difficult, she said. Being visibly pregnant often dampens employment prospects. Such jobs often demand travel, and pregnant women are discouraged from flying in their final trimester.
She also said that not having maternity leave policies in place was at odds with recent pushes for gender parity in the entertainment industry.
“It impacts women’s ability to have equality,” Dimmock, 41, said. After a year on Cobra, she made enough to have the Directors Guild health benefits reinstated last March. (Canepari’s benefits were reinstated earlier.)
The guild’s coverage, called the DGA-Producer Pension and Health Plans, is run by a board of trustees, split equally between guild and employer representatives. According to a guild spokeswoman, the minimum earnings required to qualify for health coverage are considerably less than the $47,371 a director makes from directing a single one-hour television episode.
“The matter was recently brought to the DGA, and we have asked the Plans to examine it,” the DGA spokeswoman said.
Other entertainment industry unions have similar health benefit requirements. The earnings threshold for members of the Writers Guild of America is $39,463, which qualifies them for a year of benefits.
“If you are out on maternity or paternity leave and have already earned the threshold, you’re covered,” said Jason Gordon, a spokesman for the Writers Guild.
Eighty-one percent of American workers do not receive maternity or parental leave, according to Katie Bethell, executive director of the advocacy group, Paid Leave for the United States, which is supporting Dimmock’s campaign.
Still, Bethell said, there has been a significant shift toward embracing parental leave in recent years, notably in the finance, tech and legal industries, and especially in workplaces where women held leadership roles. Parental benefits for independent contractors and freelancers, however, remain negligible.
