The Writers Guild of America West 2013 TV Staffing Brief, the organization’s analysis of who was hired to write American television shows during the 2011-2012 season, is out, and as usual, the results for women and people of color are not encouraging. Of 1722 writers who wrote for 190 shows, 519 or 30.5 percent of them were women, and 269 of them were people of color. For women, those numbers are up 5 percent from the 1999-2000 television season—as the report put it, “At this rate of increase, it would be another 42 years before women —roughly half of the U.S. population – reach proportionate representation in television staff employment.” And for people of color, the rate of increase is more mixed: the percentage of Asian and Latino writers has risen 2.9 percent since 1999-2000, but the number of African-American television writers has grown much more slowly in the same time period, rising from 5.8 percent to 6.5 percent of overall writers. If the percentage of African-American writers is going to rise just .063 percent, it will take 87 years for black television writers to reach proportional representation in their industry relative to their current presence in the U.S. population.

Part of the reason these numbers are so frustrating to see again and again is that it only takes a few shows to make a difference. As the report points out, “until the recent rise of multicultural dramas like ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal,”—both shows created by Shonda Rhimes— “there had been no successful television dramas that featured a critical mass of minority leading roles or writers.” If all of the 55 shows that hired no writers of color in the 2011-2012 season hired just one person of color to write for them, the representation of writers of color in television would rise three percent. And the examples of a few networks show that it’s not impossible to find women and people of color to hire for all kinds of positions. 50 percent of MTV’s executive producers, 43.5 of the CW’s executive producers, and 38.5 percent of ABC Family’s executive producers are women. 13.3 percent of the executive producers on ABC are people of color, a number likely significantly driven, again, by Shonda Rhimes. 55 percent of BET’s writers are women, and 95 percent of them are people of color. Clearly, there are women and people of color available and eager to work in television, if only someone would think to ask.

Or, as Marlo Thomas put it when I asked her how she found female writers for That Girl, back at a time when television was even more male and white, “Well, you looked for them. You called agents and said ‘What comedy writers do you have that are women? We’re looking for women to write for That Girl’ We’d go to the writers’ agents. Someone would see a name on somebody else’s show and say this stuff’s really good. But when you put out a call like that to agents, agents can’t wait to get jobs for their writers.”

It’s an instruction that the 19 shows that hired no women writers in the 2011-2012 season, and the 55 shows that hired no writers of color during that same time period might take to heart. It’s worth noting that these shows’ lack of diversity doesn’t define all of them. Mike White, who wrote all of the episodes of the first season of Enlightened himself, turned in one of the most complex, sympathetic portrayals of a woman anywhere on television. And Breaking Bad, which employed no writers of color in the 2011-2012 season, produced one of the most nuanced roles for a man of color to appear on screen in the last decade. But just because white men can get it right about women and people of color doesn’t render women and people of color irrelevant—it just means that the standards for white men who are writing female characters or characters of color should be higher. The list of shows that didn’t hire women writers or writers of color in the 2011-2012 season should provide a pretty clear guide to which writers are rising above their own life experiences—and which ones are badly in need of new perspectives in their writers’ rooms:

Television Shows That Hired No Women Writers During The 2011-2012 Season

America’s Funniest Home Videos
Big Time Rush
Californication
Comedy Bang! Bang!
Dancing With The Stars
Eagleheart
Enlightened (Creator Mike White wrote all the episodes)
Futurama
Geniuses
Gurland On Gurland
The Insider
Kickin’ It
Locke & Key
Magic City
Psych
Teen Wolf
Veep
Workaholics I
Workaholics II
Read more

Chloe Angyal and Jessica Wakemen, two feminist pop culture writers of whom I’m quite fond, went on Fox to declare that the ban on abortion in prime time television is officially over, and Jessica makes a particularly valuable point: “There is not much variety in abortion plot lines on TV. Too many shows fall prey to the ‘I was considering an abortion but then, oops, I fell down the stairs and lost the baby’ plot line, which is a total cop-out. Abortion should not be something that TV writers only bring up as a vehicle to make the woman have a miscarriage.”

And I think this is exactly right. Abortion shouldn’t just be portrayed as something that’s considered and then abandoned. Abortions shouldn’t only be performed by monstrous people — as they were in a recent episode of American Horror Story, which increasingly seems to suggest that the end of a pregnancy before term, whether by miscarriage, abortion, or murder, is the ultimate expression of evil — or even necessarily morally conflicted ones. And a character having an abortion shouldn’t always have to result in an emotional trauma plotline. I’m okay with all of those storylines — except for maybe the monstrous abortionist in the basement alternating between performing Frankenstein operations on pigs and performing abortions on starlets — but only if they’re not the only thing on television.

When arcs like these are balanced with stories about women who get abortions and treat them like the routine medical procedures that they are, then we’ll be making the kind of progress we need most. Much as is the case with getting diverse actors on television, there’s more to being truly diverse than checking off quota boxes. There is diversity within the black community. People have a range of experiences with abortion. We need this sort of second-order thinking for lots of kinds of stories, not just ones about pregnancy.

The bridge is yours.

-Figuring out the extent of the damage to the Washington Monument.

-A 7-year-old on Starfire.

-Really wish Grey’s Anatomy wasn’t going to punish Cristina for having an abortion.

-Five medical lessons from medical dramas.

-Not going to lie: I don’t care how bad this movie is. I will go see it.

I don’t know that I’ve ever sat through an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, but I was pleasantly surprised to hear from readers that in the second episode of this season of the show, Sandra Oh’s character, Cristina Yang, had an abortion — and not because she got pregnant and it was inconvenient, or because she was raped, or because she’s broke and desperate — but because she doesn’t want to have children. Which is one of those things that people feel, but still gets treated as if it’s a risky thing to say unless you’re Helen Mirren.

So I watched the episode, and I actually thought they did a pretty nice job with it — particularly with this scene, which I thought was a good illustration of how stressful it must be to terminate a pregnancy without the support of your partner:

Grey‘s is a soap opera, but it’s a soap opera that reached an average of 11.41 million people per episode last season. So this is big, even if it’s a one-off.

Then, there’s also the news that Mindy Kaling is developing a show for NBC where she plays an ob/gyn, a character she’s basing on her mother who, as her brother puts it in the profile of Kaling that recently ran in the New York Times, is “a professional gossip who does Pap smears.” I really, really hope that there’s a way for the show to handle abortion at some point. It would get ridiculous fairly quickly for an ob/gyn to only ever has patients who are overjoyed about their pregnancies and to never have a patient who doesn’t want to be pregnant, or can’t — for whatever reason — stay pregnant. At minimum, there have to be conversations about birth control and sexual and reproductive health, and the mere possibility of something like that being on network television every week makes me so joyous my heart runs the risk of exploding.

The fact that we live in a world where women making vagina jokes on networks is enough to send some dude-critics to the fainting couch illustrates how necessary something like Kaling’s show is, how necessary Grey‘s decision was. These shows don’t have to end the conversation, but they’re a vital acknowledgment that lady business isn’t just that.