Jessica Heidt is an American script supervisor and continuity department at Pixar Animation Studios.
Heidt also got to tell her story on the fourth episode of Inside Pixar.
History[]
She is credited with the creation of a new program in Pixar's systems that track their scripts by gender and let the crew know the "gender balance" in the films they are making. Jessica won an Unsung Hero Award (a trophy/award given to Pixar employees, also called a "Russell" due to the physical trophy being in the shape of the character of the same name from the 2009 Pixar film).
Heidt was inspired to make this program due to a problem she had been noticing throughout the films she was working at in Pixar. That problem being a consistent uneven gender ratio in the Pixar films. As a script supervisor, she had access to all of the films' scripts. While looking over the scripts for Cars 3, she did some calculations on how many lines male characters spoke versus female characters' spoken lines. She then discovered that the first script for Cars 3 was 90% male and only 10% female.
Heidt then presented the data as "unemotional as possible" and just presented the facts to people she thought had enough power to change this. This included the director. The director then changed some characters in the Cars 3 script to female to try to make the difference. She was then approached by Josh Miner, who is in Pixar's tools department, and asked if she would want to help integrate her gender counting system into all of Pixar's software. The two of them, and a Miner's intern, were able to integrate it with Pixar's software and now the program is helping all future Pixar films with gender balance.
