Stars of Spanish cinema have lashed out at the lack of women in the film industry at the country's equivalent of the Oscars. "We need directors, screenwriters, directors of photography, scripts, technicians, composers -- equal in number to men," said actress Nora Navas, a vice president of the Spanish Film Academy, during the Goyas in Madrid on Saturday.

"Feminism in Germany has been lagging behind for the last 40 or 50 years," she added. "It has not advanced as far, and #MeToo is in many ways an expression of power." Germany also has been relatively slow to modernize its laws against rape. It took until 1997 for Parliament to recognize rape in marriage as a crime. Polls have found that 40% of women in Germany report having experienced sexual or physical abuse.

In a year in which the entertainment industry was rocked by harassment scandals, women’s stories have become more important than ever before. But even as waves of claims exposed destructive male behavior, toppled long-protected gatekeepers and finally, desperately insisted that women be believed, the slow but necessary shift toward greater representation of female voices took several important steps forward in 2017 with a wellspring of films featuring challenging, complex heroines who demanded to speak their truth without caring whether audiences liked what they had to say, or how they said it.

Hollywood’s feminists have previously been accused of representing an elitist group, who are far removed from the struggles of ordinary, less glamorous women. The Time’s Up movement is a serious attempt to counter these accusations through showing solidarity with working women of all backgrounds and ethnicities.

Last year, the three most popular films in the US had female leads, with Star Wars: The Last Jedi at No 1, followed by Beauty and the Beast and Wonder Woman in third place. And there’s plenty more where they came from. Hollywood is still waking up to its masculinity problem, but 2018 looks as if it could be the year powerful women roar on screen in female-driven sci-fi, action blockbusters and super-sleuth thrillers.

The three most popular movies at theaters in the United States and Canada in 2017 — “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “Wonder Woman” — were each driven by female characters, something that has not happened in at least 37 years, as far back as full box office data is available.

Called Time’s Up, the movement was announced on Monday with an impassioned pledge of support to working-class women in an open letter signed by hundreds of women in show business, many of them A-listers. The letter also ran as a full-page ad in The New York Times, and in La Opinion, a Spanish-language newspaper. “The struggle for women to break in, to rise up the ranks and to simply be heard and acknowledged in male-dominated workplaces must end; time’s up on this impenetrable monopoly,” the letter says.

“As a writer I was very hungry to create female characters who felt real, and I was interested in telling stories from an outsider’s perspective,” Ms. Hart said, recalling Hollywood in the early 2000s. “There wasn’t a lot of receptivity to the things I really wanted to write about at the time. I think there is increasing openness to those things now, which makes me really hopeful.”

For equality to happen, we have to rebalance the scales, which means more women calling the shots—telling their own stories, controlling the narrative, joining and, yes, even dominating the conversation. After all, the problem isn’t that we don’t know women exist. The problem is that women’s lives and worth are still controlled and defined by men. It’s men who decide which issues matter, who counts as a “great artist,” whose story is worth listening to.

She was the first woman admitted to the Directors Guild of America and the first woman to direct a sound picture (1928's Manhattan Cocktail). She also directed Paramount's first talking feature, 1929 box-office hit The Wild Party with Clara Bow. She's credited with inventing the first boom mic when she attached a microphone to a fishing pole. She was the first film editor to receive a screen credit. And when she began teaching at UCLA in 1965, her first student to achieve major success was 1967 Master of Fine Arts recipient Francis Ford Coppola, who calls "Miss Arzner" the "consummate professional film director."

"We just need many, many more people given opportunities so people are able to try things and figure things out as they go," Ridley says. "And in the Star Wars world, we now have a lovely, rich, diverse universe and to be headed by a woman would be the next step. It would be great."