I've written about Hollywood's hiring track record many times since I started as a television critic eight years ago -- and yet it bears repeating again.

Hollywood -- that so-called bastion of liberal thinking -- still has a horrible track record in hiring women and minorities. That's disappointing for audiences when the percentage of minorities and women who watch TV and movies is much higher than the percentage who make them.

This topic is timely again because a new report from the Writers Guild of America shows that nothing has changed.

According to a Variety story this week, the WGA West's 2009 Hollywood Writers Report -- based on data from 2003 to 2007 -- finds "little if any" improvement in employment and salaries for women and minorities in Hollywood.

The report by UCLA professor Darnell Hunt showed that women still represented only 28 percent of the guild's TV writers and 18 percent of screenwriters. Meanwhile, the percentage of minority writers, at 6 percent, has remained the same since 1999. The percentage of female directors in TV is even lower, while only 9 percent of minorities are directing in television.

The average female writer earns the same annual salary today as she did five years ago, according to the guild report, while the salary for men rose 8 percent in the same time span. In film, the gap between what minorities and white writers earn actually widened.

Serious filmmakers and television producers will tell you they strive to make art that reflects life. But this country is made up of diverse points of view by people from all walks of life, and Hollywood is failing to bring them to audiences with its myopic view of American culture.

For example, the number of television shows with all African-American casts has gone down, not up, since the WB network folded into the CW. That's a curious trend particularly now, considering that this country -- in real life, that is -- elected its first African-American president.

How can you accurately reflect America's people when most writers providing our entertainment are white, upper-middle-class men who have little idea of what it is like to be different in this country?

Tinsel Town likes to consider itself a conclave of progressive thought. But the filmmaking industry famously is a place where you succeed based on whom you know. As long as the vast majority of hiring producers are white and male, there always will be little opportunity for anyone outside the system to break in.

Vince Horiuchi 's column appears Fridays. He can be reached at vince@sltrib.com or 801-257-8607. For more television insights, visit Horiuchi's blog, "The Village Vidiot," at blogs.sltrib.com/tv/. Send comments about this column to livingeditor@sltrib.com.