Those doing the hiring used to be almost all men. In 1987, Dawn Steel became the president of Columbia Pictures, making her the first woman to run a major Hollywood studio. Since then, women have held power positions throughout the industry and two women now help run studios and others head up divisions. For years, I thought more female executives would mean more female directors. Yet sexism in the workplace doesn’t necessarily surface in clear, crude ways, and it’s unusual for anything damning or actionable in the movie business to leak out. Sexism there often works like a virus that spreads through ideas, gossip, and stories about women, their aesthetic visions and personal choices, and doubts about whether they can hack it in that male-dominated world. Of course, the end result is that female directors don’t get hired.