“Last year, as the presidential election got under way, re-search conducted for the Women’s Media Center showed that men reported 65% of U.S. political stories in 2014. Research commissioned by the center on the 2012 presi-dential election found that 71% of front-page stories were written by men and that on cable and network TV, political news show guests and experts were 77% men.

The 1998 conviction of Jean-Paul Akayesu—a former may-or of Taba, a small commune 40 miles west of the capital Kigali—was a “watershed” moment, says Lauren Wolfe, journalist and director of Women Under Siege. “Until then, rape had been on the books as a prosecutable crime in war, but it hadn’t actually been prosecuted,” says Wolfe. “[Akayesu] was a real sea-change moment.”

“Look at your neighborhood paper and local news station to see how many women are represented,” says Jane Fonda. “When you see an imbalance, contact the Women’s Media Center.”

Julie Burton, president of the Women’s Media Centerin Washington, D.C. says that the feminist side of this issue is that, onscreen, women are outnumbered by men as film leads by a margin of 2 to 1. “Which means the fact that Jennifer Lawrence is playing a lead character in an action movie is a big deal—one to be celebrated,” Ms. Burton writes to the Monitor in an email. “Movies tell us who we are and what we can be and the marketers for this movie had a choice of the kind of image they wanted to portray to sell the movie. Rather than choosing a strong, affirma-tive action image of the woman character, they chose one where she was in the violent grips of a male character.