Edited by Rosa Barotsi, Gloria Dagnino and Carla Mereu Keating In the last twenty years, increasing scholarly attention has been devoted to the screen industries as a workplace and as a site of institutional and individual cultural and creative practice (e.g., Deuze 2007; Mayer, Banks and Caldwell 2009; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2010). Studies in this field have often centred on film, television and audiovisual media production (e.g., Caldwell 2008; Barra, Bonini and Splendore 2016; Comand and Venturini 2021), although forms of labour in circulation, promotion and reception of media texts have also attracted interest (e.g. Loist 2011; Grainge and Johnson 2015; Fanchi and Garofalo 2018; Treveri Gennari et al. 2020). Within these studies, a number of scholars have interrogated and utilised gender as an analytic category in order to expose and criticise unequal and divisive labour dynamics (e.g., Foster 1997; Gaines, Vatsal and Dall’Asta 2013-; Bell 2021). The gendered division of labour and the systematic exclusion of female-identifying professionals in the screen industries persistently emerge as global, transnational issues (e.g., Gledhill and Knight 2015; Hole, Jelača, Kaplan and Petro 2016; Liddy 2020). In Italy, pioneering studies on women’s labour in the audiovisual sector can be traced back to the 1970s (Bellumori 1972; Carrano 1977), but it is only in recent years that a gender perspective has been taken on more systematically, focusing on directors (e.g., Scarparo and Luciano 2010, 2013, 2020; Cantini 2013) as well as other above- and below-the-line professions (e.g., Dall’Asta 2008; Cardone and Fanchi 2011; Cardone, Jandelli and Tognolotti 2015; Buffoni 2018; Missero 2022).