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.

According to the Women’s Media Center, news outlets continue to fall down on the job when it comes to hiring and promoting women of color. Of course, this takes a toll on the types of stories that get told, a particularly dismaying prospect in an era of resurgent misogyny and white supremacy.

Kate McCarthy runs SheSource at the Women’s Media Center, a database of over 1,000 female experts that journal-ists can turn to when looking for sources. She noted that peo-ple tend to go first to people who look like them—and that men in particular tend to turn to men. “I think that women have been underrepresented in science and technology over time, and I think old habits die hard. I think people are used to seeing certain sorts of people doing an authoritative voice in a particular area; I think that science journalists have tended to be more male and men tend to turn to men more than they turn to women, and more than women turn to women.”

A lengthy 2015 study by the Women’s Media Centershowed that when it came to stories about rape in sports, less than 2 percent of the coverage was devoted to the impact on the alleged victim.

In order to paint a more accurate picture of the world we live in, Julie Burton, president of the Women’s Media Center, told Glamour women must be equal partners in deciding what constitutes a story and how that story should be told.

The alleged sexism of the 2008 campaign inspired the Women’s Media Center to draw up a guide to gender neutral coverage of female politicians for reporters.

Jill Filipovic, explains that with an issue so closely linked to women’s lives, it becomes necessary to hear not just from men and women equally, but to get a majority of women’s voices. Women’s Media Center’s Director of Communi-cations, Cristal Williams Chancellor, agreed, saying in an email, “women’s voices, experiences and perspectives must be given greater priority and should mirror the population whose lives are often shaped by reproductive health issues.”

The Women’s Media Center (co-founded by two-time Oscar winner Jane Fonda) recently reported that in the past decade, women have received only 19 percent of all non-acting Oscar nominations. This year in cinematogra-phy, directing and editing, only one woman made the cut

Women, of course, always make up 50 percent of the act-ing nominees, but they’ve received only 19 percent of the non-acting nominations over the past decade, according to a report by the Women’s Media Center released last week. Only 12 films directed by women have been nom-inated for best picture, ever. That’s 2.3 percent of all best picture nominees. Women have been more successful in technical categories such as costume design, but no wom-an has ever been nominated for best cinematography.

According to The Women’s Media Center, at this year’s Oscars, women only represent 22 percent of non-acting nominees, which includes producers, writers, directors, and cinematographers.

The lack of diversity in Hollywood can be attributed to a range of systemic problems within the Hollywood studio system, and statistics from the Women’s Media Center add to the evidence that it is time for the industry to make changes.

A recent study by the Women’s Media Center found that women have scored only 19 percent of all non-acting nom-inations over the past 10 years.

“There is a clear connection between the low num-bers of women hired for behind-the-scenes jobs in film and women’s low representation among Oscar nomi-nees,” WMC president, Julie Burton, said in a statement accompanying the release of the findings. “If they’re not hired in these non-acting categories, they’ll never have a chance to be recognized for their excellence.”