Boys' Club

Guess how many women are on Entertainment Weekly's list of the 25 Greatest Active Film Directors?

If you said zero, give yourself 1,000 points.

Here are my Top 10 female directors, with seven honorable mentions, in case anyone's under the mistaken impression there were simply none to include on the list.

Btw, Guillermo del Toro and Ang Lee are the only men of color on the list.

Here's another reason this list is problematic, in case you needed one. I just went and looked up the most recent films released by every director on the list; see if you can spot anything they have in common—or, more accurately, lack in common:

Steven Spielberg—Indiana Jones IV
Peter Jackson—King Kong
Martin Scorsese—The Departed
Christopher Nolan—The Dark Knight
Steven Soderbergh—Che
Ridley Scott—Body of Lies
Quentin Tarantino—Grindhouse/Death Proof/Planet Terror
Michael Mann—Miami Vice
James Cameron—Titanic
Joel and Ethan Coen—Burn After Reading
Guillermo del Toro—Hellboy II
David Fincher—The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Tim Burton—Sweeney Todd
Judd Apatow—Knocked Up
Sam Raimi—Spider-Man III
Zack Snyder—300
Darren Aronofsky—The Wrestler
Danny Boyle—Slumdog Millionaire
Clint Eastwood—Gran Torino
Ron Howard—Frost/Nixon
Ang Lee—Brokeback Mountain
Paul Thomas Anderson—There Will Be Blood
Paul Greengrass—The Bourne Ultimatum
Pedro Almodóvar—Volver
Jon Favreau—Iron Man

Pedro Almodóvar's Volver is the only film on that list with a clear female protagonist who doesn't have to play second fiddle to a male lead (or a CGI ape) or get sexually assaulted.*

Anyone else think that's a problem?

* UPDATE: Shaker Chevalier points out in comments that "Cruz's character, the protagonist [in Volver] does get sexually assaulted in the film." So, in fact, not a single one of the most recent films made by "the 25 Greatest Active Film Directors" has a female protagonist who doesn't play second fiddle to a male lead or get sexually assaulted in the course of the film.

How about that?