As I'm sure you've heard by now, on Sunday night Kathryn Bigelow became the first female director to win the Academy Award for Best Director for "The Hurt Locker."

Doesn't it seem like in the year 2010, it should be pretty hard to find anything where someone could be the "first female"?  Something as high profile as the Oscar awards should certainly be ashamed to be cracking the "first female" label.  It's trite to point out that the Academy is an "old boy's club" to end all old boy's clubs, but still!  People!  IT IS THE FUTURE.  

Only three other female directors have been nominated for Best Director in the past.  According to the Los Angeles Times, the list is:

• Lina Wertmueller, Seven Beauties (1975)
• Jane Campion, The Piano (1993)
• Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation (2003)

And according to the San Francisco Chronicle, "women are only 7 percent of the top-grossing directors."  Seven percent!  

The argument that gets trotted out against Affirmative Action is that "if there were any good ____s, they would have been hired already."  (Fill in the blank with your minority or disparaged population of choice.  Since women are 51% of the population, technically we are not a minority, but you know.)

However, it is hard to make this case for a meritocracy when your population is down in the single digits like that.  Seven percent!  According to statistics, that figure should be 51%.  So why such a huge discrepancy?  Put simply, although talk show hosts like to bash Hollywood for being ultra-liberal, it's still very much a men's club.  And a white men's club, to boot.

The money in Hollywood comes from the studio heads, and the financial backers behind them.  That money is what gets thrown behind a director in a high profile movie.  And clearly, they are not willing to throw their money behind a female director.  To the tune of a 44% gender discrepancy!

This system puts it in better perspective, because the upper echelons of corporate America - the very echelons which are picking directors for top-budget movies - are also almost unilaterally white and male.  Only 16% of CEOs are women, although 20% of Fortune 500 companies have female CEOs.

The question of why there are so few female directors, and why it has taken so long for a female director to win an Oscar, is the same story all over again.  I often hear women say "I'm not a feminist" or "feminism is irrelevant," which boggles my mind. We have made a lot of gains in the world, but we're clearly still not on the same footing.  The fight for equality isn't over, as Bigelow's Oscar first points out.

Although even given all that, I did think it was a little much to play "I Am Woman Hear Me Roar" as Bigelow left the stage.  I wonder who picked that song?  Was it Bigelow's choice, or the choice of a back-patting Academy member?  An excellent example of why context matters.