Women Win Prizes, Fewer Women Submit

Venice just gave its top prize to a female director for the first time in four years. Everyone is calling it a reckoning.

Margherita Mazzucato's A Woman Unknown won the Golden Lion after years of public pressure over how few women make it into the main competition lineup. This is what redemption looks like in the attention economy. A single year's correction is treated as systemic repair.

Except Venice has performed this exact gesture before. In 2019, the festival awarded Lina Wertmüller a lifetime Golden Lion recognition, the first woman to receive it — and leadership positions went to women for the first time. Yet in 2020, women made up 28 percent of the main competition, a number that fell to 21 percent by 2023.

This is how systems reproduce themselves while appearing to change. The visible victory obscures the invisible mechanism. Fewer women are in the pipeline feeding it. Anthony Giddens called this structuration — the way institutions remake themselves continuously without ever genuinely transforming. The people running them inherit the same filters, same networks, same blind spots their predecessors had. Giving the award to Mazzucato feels like proof of change. It actually proves only that talent occasionally makes it through the bottleneck despite it.

A committee can always find one brilliant woman to anoint.

The question worth watching isn't whether A Woman Unknown deserved to win, it did. The real question is whether Venice's selection committee expanded the actual submissions from female directors, or simply picked more carefully from the same constrained pool. If female directors' share of entries remains flat while the prize went to a woman, then nothing structural moved at all. A committee can always find one brilliant woman to anoint. What matters is whether the festival made it easier for fifty more to submit in the first place. Redemption that doesn't widen access is just better marketing for the same gatekeeping.