Double Trouble? Charting the Experiences of Australian Women Picture Editors Over Age 50: Charting the experiences of Australian women picture editors over fifty

In the contemporary screen industries, women are disproportionately under-represented in nearly all areas, apart from costume, hair and makeup, and production support roles (Smith 2019). For older women workers, the problem of invisibility is even more entrenched. For example, quantitative research identifies the crippling workplace prejudice faced by women directors over 50 (Smith et al., Inclusion in the Director’s chair: gender, race, and age of directors across 1,200 top films from 2007 to 2018, 2019, 9). This chapter provides a preliminary overview of how gender intersects with age to impact workers in the Australian screen postproduction sector. We do this through a comparison of themes emerging in interview data collected from female-identifying picture editors over the age of 50. Alongside producing and production design, editing is the only area of the Australian screen industry that approaches gender parity. However older women who work as editors may face unique challenges, such as ongoing demands for technological ‘fluency’; perceptions about workers’ ability to ‘stay current’ with the software; and industry contacts and connections that may shift over time. This chapter takes a first step in building understanding of the experiences of this important yet overlooked cohort of workers, as impacted by doubled factors of gender and age.