Without that, each woman, on an individual career level, must attempt to struggle up a mountain so slick with mud that there is no step made that is completely forward-moving.
A female filmmaker was sent a list of 100 “films-you-must-see” before arriving at a top film school. Almost every single one was directed by a white man. She had seen almost none of them, and as she watched that summer, the films said nothing to her. Throughout her film school career, her male classmates would wax lyrical about the genius of these movies, making her feel like an unsophisticated philistine because she didn’t “understand” them.
While a general post–film school sense of demoralization and irrelevance somewhat helps explain those numbers, we must dig deeper still to find out why such a huge number of women are dropping out of the industry before even making their first micro-budget feature film. The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative revealed that, even as of 2018, only 22 percent of the feature films submitted to Sundance are directed by women. That could easily be explained away by the fact that it’s harder for women to get their films made in the first place, and that there is a huge barrier to entry on getting a film made at all.