Not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you. It’s just that I have noticed that it’s usually a female name that appears in the credits.
Why?
Thanks
Quasi
Probably the same reason that directors, writers, producers, and tech artists are nearly always male?
Sorry, not buying that one! 
I can name you many female directors, but not one male casting director or agency.
Q
Um - you’re on crack?
Seriously, that was my first reaction. Who the hell thinks movies are FEMALE dominated? It’s clearly male.
But then I thought - well, maybe that’s my prejudices talking. So I went looking for some hard data on IMDB.
Methodology: Take the first five movies in “Top at the Box Office” (top left). Currently, this happens to be:
1 He’s Just Not That Into You
2 Taken
3 Coraline
4 The Pink Panther 2
5 Paul Blart: Mall Cop*****
Then I counted:
a) Male:Female ratios of names I could read on the poster (not that many in many cases - crap quality pix)
b) Male:Female ratios of names in the cast list (ie not just the stars, but not all the way down to the uncredited extras)
Results:
1 He’s Just Not That Into You
Poster - 4:5
Cast - 27:36
Comments: Girls lead here. But this is a very VERY girly movie. I’ll be surprised if we get any more “Female Dominated” than this, and you notice the numbers are moderately close, specially re “stars”
2 Taken
Poster - 1:0
Cast - 26:9
Comments: Yeah, this was more like I was expecting.
3 Coraline
Poster - can’t read any names
Cast - 10:9
Comments: A kids movie. Pretty much a M:F dead heat
4 The Pink Panther 2
Poster - 1:0
Cast - 24:7
Comments: Uhuh
5 Paul Blart: Mall Cop
Poster - 1:0
Cast - 27:14
Comments: Here we go again
Cumulative results
Posters - 7:5
Cast - 114:75
Comments: Yep. You’re on crack.
Nobody does. The OP is asking why Casting Agents are primarily females.
:smack:
I looked at “casting” and thought “the cast”
Don’t mind me…
Quasi’s not saying the cast is overly female, but that the people credited as casting movies are overly female.
Going through the same five movies, IMDb’s 5 tops at box office:
“He’s Just Not That into You”:
Justine Baddeley
Kim Davis
First is a female name, the second on research is a “Kimberley,” again a female name.
“Taken”:
Ferne Cassel
Nathalie Cheron
The second is a female name. Not sure about the first-- it appears to be female with a few Googles, but I’ll give the benefit of the doubt and say “unknown.”
“Coraline”:
Linda Lamontagne
Female.
“The Pink Panther 2”:
Ilene Starger
Female.
“Paul Blart: Mall Cop”:
Jeanne McCarthy
Anne Mulhall
Female and female.
So, for the top 5 movies, we’re looking at 7 female casters, and one whose gender is probably female according to Google. No blatant males in sight.
So, as Quasi asked in the beginning, why? (I have an idea that it might be to cut down on accusations of a “casting couch,” but I’d like to hear better-formed ideas.)
The curses of a researched post; as has already been pointed out, the OP wasn’t looking at casts.
I was about to have my coffee tested by the crime lab! 
And, to be fair, the wording of the OP could have been better. Sorry!
Q
I don’t have an answer, but I’ve noticed that in the Visual Effects* industry there are very few females. What surprises me about that is the graphic arts community is dominantly female, so you’d think there’d be more crossover.
*Not Special Effects, which tends to be a boys club of building stuff and blowing it up - but Visual Effects, digital computery stuff
Lynn Stalmaster, the most famous casting director in Hollywood (now retired), and the only one I can name off the top of my head, is a guy.
Back in Hollywood studio days (say, 1920-1950), the jobs were quite clearly slanted towards one sex or the other. This was no different than most businesses at the time. There may have been a few female bosses in some offices and even perhaps a tiny number of male secretaries, but overwhelmingly the boss was male and the secretary was female. It worked the same way in Hollywood studios, where the directors and producers were overwhelmingly male and the script supervisors (who were then usually called the “script girls”) and the casting directors were female. The editors, music supervisors, and cameramen were also overwhelmingly male. In general, if you supervised people or hauled around equipment, you were supposed to be male, since only men were supposed to boss other people around or carry heavy objects. If you worked behind the scenes calling people about their participation in a future film or if you sat quietly most of the time on the set and occasionally made sure of the continuity from one scene to the next, you were supposed to be female, since they considered what you did to be just a secretarial job. The closest to an ambiguous job was being a screenwriter. You were important to the film and in some sense its creator, so it was like a male job. However, your job consisted in sitting in a room by yourself and typing, so it was like a female job. Screenwriting jobs weren’t consistently dominated by men or by women.
1934-1949: Eleven of the eighty-eight nominees for the Academy Award for editing were female.
I don’t know that casting really is predominantly female today, but it wouldn’t surprise me so I’ll answer working under the assumption that it is. Like Tracy Lord, I have some suspicion that it might be because casting director is not a particularly powerful position. (Or at least it doesn’t strike me as being that way; I don’t work in Hollywood or anything so I don’t have special knowledge here.) The main movie director would normally be the one to decide on casting for lead roles, and the casting director is supposed to be carrying out the main director’s vision even when it comes to supporting roles and extras.
Casting director is an important position in terms of getting the movie made, but the casting director isn’t normally doing much in the way of creative decision making. The casting director doesn’t get to decide “I think this line in the dance club scene should be delivered by a tall, black drag queen”, it’s the main director who tells the casting director “Get me a tall, black drag queen for the club scene.” I imagine that a lot of men would look at the job of casting director and decide they don’t want it, although that’s just my guess.
I’m sure there are plenty of men who would be great casting directors, but I can also see several ways that gender stereotypes would work in favor of a woman who wanted the job. As Student Driver says, a female casting director would also cut down on the perception that the “casting couch” style of casting was going on, and it might be assumed that women, children, and inexperienced performers in general will find a female casting director less threatening. A casting director might sometimes have to go out and find people with special skills but no acting experience to appear in the film (e.g. dancers, jugglers, athletes) and a woman might be considered better able to do this without seeming creepy or suspicious. Women are often considered to have better social skills than men, so that would work in a female casting director’s favor – especially since the casting director may also be responsible for dealing with the actors’ agents.
Thanks, Walloon. Editing I guess would also be somewhat ambiguous in terms of the usual male/female division of jobs at the time. In some ways an editor is making important choices about the film. However, in some ways the editor is merely caring out the orders of the director (and they work in some back office where they don’t interact with other crew members or the cast). I suspect that some editors had more control than others.
Purely anecdotal, but what I recall is a saying that today’s receptionist is tomorrow’s casting director. They have very little power, as has already been said - more of an HR clerk than a director at all. Mostly they sort through actors for minor roles and select some for the director to see. More substantial roles are often filled by the director.
As near as I could tell, the casting director would get an order for blonde, pretty, 18-22 to play 15, and would put out the casting notice, sort ot the ones considered hopless, and set up auditions (or tape auditions) for a few to pass on to the director. Pretty much an admin job on most levels, although a few like the aforementioned Stallmaster and Jane Feinberg seem to get more to do and are prpbably trusted accordingly to cast smaller roles and day players.
I don’t have an answer, but I think the names on this list support the premise that most (certainly not all) casting directors are women, at least in Los Angeles.
Mrs. Cake’s description of what a CD does is pretty accurate, from my experiences on the fringes of the industry. CDs have a lot of power over individual actors in that they have the power to say no, but they have little if any power to say yes.
As a side note, only a small fraction of casting in LA involves the films you see in theaters. There are thousands upon thousands of commercials cast every year, plus industrial films, episodic TV, indie features*, short subjects, and of course Television.
Oh, and of course stage, but that’s more likely to involve the director from the beginning.
- Like, real indie, not a major studios “indie” label.
You wouldn’t think there is a casting couch if the casting director is female.
Just out of curiosity, why not? One imagines both the sexes have their share of villains.
Interestingly women do dominate the film industry & TV casting but men predominate in theatre/musical casting and have some indie film presence.
You seem to be laboring under the false assumption that men and women have the same attitudes and perspective on sex. They don’t. Different priorities and different libidos make the male and female take on sex nothing like each other, despite what the feminist crowd (boths sexes are equal in every way lalala I can’t hear you!) would have you believe.
The casting couch cliche is abusing your power to coerce sexual favors. That means it’s basically one step removed from rape. Do you also wonder why there aren’t as many female rapists as male?
In short, you wouldn’t expect a woman to perpetrate the casting couch cliche because a woman simply wouldn’t be into that kind of thing. Similar to how women rock stars go on the road and find it miserable, because the main perk (and driving force for most male rock bands) of getting different strange every night is just not appealing to women.