Life in the highly competitive film industry has always been unfair…sexist, racist…never a bed of roses…cronyism, boys club reciprocity, the usual rough-and-tumble.

But for a while there equity quotas and being guilt-tripped by Stacy L. Smith and the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative was definitely stirring the pot…culturally, politically.

Things are somewhat better for women (and also, I presume, directors of color and LGBTQ persuasion) than they were in 2007, when only 2.7% of working directors were female. It’s a rigged game, but less so as we currently speak. Changes for the better have come about over the last 18 years.

It’s probably also accurate to say that the USC Annenberg wokey card isn’t as big of an influencer as it was, say, starting in ’18 and peaking during Hollywod’s woke-terror chapter (’19 to ’22 or roughly a four-year period that was roughy analogous to China’s Great Cultural Revolution of the mid ’60s).