What stands out about 2017's crop of women-led films are the ways in which they amplify voices and portray journeys we've rarely heard or seen at the multiplex. Less and less are women on screen just manic pixie dream girls, damsels in distress or psycho ex-girlfriends. Less and less are they simply there to advance the plot for their male counterparts. Thanks to the visions and efforts of female writers and directors — with stellar acting by incredible women, to boot — the future of cinema is looking increasingly, refreshingly female.

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.”

“I started saying to my agents, ‘Don’t send me scripts where the first adjective in the female description is ‘beautiful.’ And if the second is ‘enigmatic,’ throw it in the trash.’ The word ‘enigmatic’ means ‘Her backstory doesn’t matter.’

The team used machine-learning-based tools to analyze the language in nearly 800 movie scripts, quantifying how much power and agency those scripts give to individual characters. In their study, recently presented in Denmark at the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, the researchers found subtle but widespread gender bias in the way male and female characters are portrayed.

While Hollywood has been overrun with the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the harsh light it has thrown on widespread gender imbalances throughout the industry, movie screens nationwide have been aglow with ambitious films by female directors who are beating the odds stacked against them.

Women and people of colour are demanding the canon be rethought, since it was not based on our shared culture, but on the experiences of one particular group that became the dominant voice. The time has come to rethink which films should be valued, taught and appreciated.

While big studio movies in the young adult fantasy genre (Hunger Games and Twilight franchises) have seen global success with female stars, the spy genre has traditionally featured male leads. Heralding a new crop of female-driven spy films was this summer's Atomic Blonde, starring Charlize Theron as an MI6 agent. "It shouldn't be a genre that is strictly male-based," says Nick Meyer, CEO of Sierra/Affinity, which financed and produced the feature. “The things that were attractive to us were that it was something fresh, with a producer-star that was committed to the idea."

“We’re a largely female team, which I think has a lot to do with it,” said Clare Stewart, director of the London Film Festival and head of festivals for the British Film Institute (BFI). “I really don’t buy into some of the comments I hear from my international peers about ‘Well, of course we would program more films by women if they were there to program.’ I think our responsibility as cultural gatekeepers is to be creating the way for change."

No Man’s Land, which is funded through donations, recently wrapped up its third season, showing 42 films by and about women this year. The festival is part of a small but growing effort of women who want to increase the media coverage women’s sports receive and change how women are talked about as athletes.