The phrase was coined back in 1991 by US writer Katha Pollitt, who bemoaned the number of films and TV programmes that featured a group with one lone female. Not just The Smurfs but also The Muppets, Winnie The Pooh, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and so forth. “The message is clear,” she wrote, “... boys are central, girls peripheral.”

In 2015’s “The Force Awakens,” the amount of female-driven dialogue more than tripled from 6.3% in “A New Hope” to nearly 28%. Moreover, the dialogue in the “Force Awakens” passed the Bechdel test, which asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women speaking to each other about something other than a man, a test “Force Awakens” passed. “A New Hope” did not.

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."

The actress posted an impassioned speech on Instagram after seeing an article in the Daily Mail that said she was 11 years older than her actual age of 44. “While, yes, it can be funny to read untrue things about yourself, I’ve been aware for years (with this newspaper but by no means confined to it) of how the glee in shaming women, often with lies like this, is so much darker and further reaching than enjoying a little schadenfreude,” Beckinsale writes.

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.”

Brave aside, Pixar has only released two other stories with a female protagonist: Inside Out, a heartwarming feature about a girl coming to grips with her emotions, and Finding Dory, the blockbuster sequel to Finding Nemo. Yet Chapman is still the only woman who has ever directed a Pixar film, even partially. There are no women attached to any of the studio’s upcoming films, which include Incredibles 2 and Toy Story 4—despite the fact that Lasseter himself directly addressed the studio’s lack of gender and racial parity back in 2015, promising that the studio was working on more films with “female and ethnic characters.”

“I was met with a wall of silence,” she told the Guardian. “People who were involved in the film were great, my friends and my family were amazing and very compassionate, but people in the industry didn’t want to know about it, they didn’t want to hear.”

Consciousness-raising is supposed to take years, but this has all happened in weeks. Everyone is implicated – not because we are all either predators or victims, but because this is about how we are with each other, and how what’s OK and what’s not is decided. I can’t think of another story in my lifetime that has so decisively transcended all boundaries.

“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.’

“We know how hard it’s going to be to change this culture,” Lauren Sivan, a Los Angeles television journalist who accused Weinstein of performing a lewd act in front of her, told The Washington Post. “But I honestly never thought we’d have made this much progress in talking about it, so I’m also optimistic,” she added.

“We want to make sure that every talented individual has an equal shot, and a path forward. But for that to happen, employers must expand their hiring processes to discover the world of capable directors hiding in plain sight. Frankly, it’s hard to understand why they’re not doing more. Even if all the right reasons are not enough for them, they should at least be motivated by the bottom line – inclusion just makes good business sense.”

“I am not one to go for traditional female roles, because I don’t think traditionally female characters are very interesting, and I don’t think they represent real life,” said the actress. “I’m working hard to break free of stereotypes that the film industry has created and nurtured around women.”