Star Trek’s Women Writers

by JARRAH HODGE

Earlier in September new numbers came out showing women have made teeny, tiny gains in representation behind-the-scenes of TV shows. According to Yahoo! TV:

“In a sign of the incremental growth, women made up 28 percent of creators, producers, directors, writers, editors, and directors of photography working on programs airing on the broadcast networks in 2012-13.”

The positions listed in the quote are what are known as “clout positions” because the people in them are the ones who have the most creative control over what ends up being shown on your TV screen. So when women, people of colour, LGBT people and people with disabilities are left out, that can impact what ends up being beamed into our living rooms.

Star Trek, like most other shows, had behind-the-scenes gender gaps, though they varied by series and season. In TOS, only 22.5% of episodes credit at least one woman writer. That went up to 30.5% during TNG, but back down to a dismal 17% in Deep Space Nine (Season 7 of Deep Space Nine credits zero women writers). 25% of Voyager episodes and 22% of Enterprise episodes credit at least one woman writer. All the other ones were written entirely by men.

That’s not to say that men can’t write great women characters and feminist stories. Certainly in Star Trek they have. But I wanted to take a look back at the women working behind the scenes of the five live-action Star Trek series, starting with the writers. I wanted to celebrate all the women from D.C. Fontana on, who broke barriers and made their mark on the franchise.
It’s hard to narrow down what to highlight.

D.C. Fontana’s The Enterprise Incident and Jean Lisette Aroeste’s Is There In Truth No Beauty? brought us some of the most interesting, complex, empowered women guest characters in the entire Original Series.

Melinda M. Snodgrass’ script for The Measure of a Man was the first TNG script ever accepted on spec and it has stood the test of time, widely recognized as one of the top 10 episodes of TNG.

Message in a Bottle, teleplay by Lisa Klink, strikes an impressive balance between being exciting and humorous, all the while doing the work of character-building for Seven of Nine, Torres and The Doctor.

But there’s so much more.

I created the list below as a resource for other people who want to find Trek episodes that credit women writers. I chose to include women who received credit for writing, teleplay, or story, due to the difficulty making judgments about who had what significant impact over a particular script.

STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL SERIES (1966 – 1969)

STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION (1987 – 1994)

STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE (1993 – 1999)

STAR TREK: VOYAGER (1995 – 2001)

STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE (2001 – 2005)

Jarrah Hodge is the founder and editor of the Gender Focus blog which looks at politics, pop culture, and current events from an anti-racist feminist perspective. Gender Focus aims to showcase news and opinion relating to issues of social inequality, stereotyping and representations of marginalized groups in society, and the intersections between gender and public policy. In 2011 and 2012 Gender Focus was named the “Best Feminist Blog” in the juried Canadian Weblog Awards. Jarrah has B.A. in Women’s Studies and Sociology from UBC, and has written for the Huffington Post, Bitch Magazine Blogs, the Vancouver Observer and About-Face.

On Jarrah’s secondary blog, Trekkie Feminist, she does in-depth analysis of Star Trek and feminism. Jarrah is a featured panelist at conventions discussing feminism relating to Star Trek and sci-fi. Follow Jarrah on Twitter.

by Deyvid