Unsung Heroes is about the untold stories of incredible women who overcame adversity to become pioneers of their time. It will profile women who were highly accomplished in their fields, but did not receive the acknowledgment for their achievements and how their stories have impacted history. The first hero to be profiled is the Asian American female silent screen star of film and theatre, Anna May Wong.

“If you didn’t get staffed, it’s because you got outcompeted, plain & simple,” Slack wrote on Twitter. “Other writers, both men & women, had better samples, better recommendations, & better meetings. It’s okay. I’ve had years where I got outcompeted, too. If you focus on raising your game instead of buying into the bullshit that the system is rigged (it’s not), that next job will come your way,” he concluded. “Trust me. Hope this helps, & I wish you the best of luck."

“What’s amazing about our station and fantastic about Seattle in general is we have three awesome women who are very strong within our station itself, and some of them are in positions of power. But if you look at Seattle, it has one of the highest percentages in the nation of women in firefighting, so that was a really important aspect to me in thinking about setting the spinoff.”

While these and other films like them generally have male-centric themes and male actors portraying the hard-driving protagonists, there are usually many nondescript stunt driving opportunities – drivers of cars swerving out of the way of the hero’s car or being crashed into by the villain’s – that tend to go almost exclusively to men. “This has been going on for years,” said a veteran stuntwoman, who recalled confronting a male stunt coordinator about the lack of women stunt drivers on a show that was shooting downtown a few years ago. “There were six or eight cop cars and they were all driven by men,” she recalled. “I said, ‘You do know that there are female police officers, right?’ And he just kind of laughed and walked away.”

As a shy, dyslexic college drop-out working for the Chicago Parks & Recreation Department, Burke was the least likely person to become a heroic champion for the disabled but she did. The myriad of obstacles in her path included the famously bigoted head of the Olympics commission who did not want to “dilute the brand” by allowing “retarded” children to masquerade as Olympians.