I went to Hollywood when I was 23. I had made a low-budget film, won an award at a prestigious festival, scored an agent and made a TV deal all within six months. It was a fairy tale most people will never experience, and I knew, as well as a 23-year-old can know anything, that I was getting a pretty great deal. I bounced from meeting to meeting with the joy of Cinderella at the ball.

These meetings, almost always with men, were rife with acts of everyday sexism — the presumption that I must want to make small “intimate” movies, a suggestion that I write a comedy focused on “the way women’s periods sync up and they go crazy for a week,” the insistence that I’d be “really funny paired with a hot girl.” There were dinners that went on too long, work lunches that turned into confessions about the broken state of the film executive’s marriage and the consistent insistence that I must, as my work suggests, be “up for anything in bed.”

I took it in stride, unloading the day’s injustices on the couch of my new friend (and now my work partner), Jenni Konner. She told me maddening stories of her own ascent and we plotted a new world for ourselves. We imagined a set run by women, men who wouldn’t dream of overstepping or underpaying, a company where girls stretched as far as the eye could see, the chance to write scripts that changed people’s perceptions of feminine identity. We would tell any man who thought that was an invitation for sex to go eat a shoe. The men we have worked with — like Judd Apatow, Hollywood’s least sleazy guy — have showed us utter respect. The only terrifying producer rage I ever experienced was from a gay man who tried to take back a purse he had bought me. We got to do all that we had dreamed of and more.

This past week, reports that Harvey Weinstein had sexually harassed women for years came to light, making it crystal clear that not every woman in Hollywood has had the chance to walk our path. Abuse, threats and coercion have been the norm for so many women trying to do business or make art. Mr. Weinstein may be the most powerful man in Hollywood to be revealed as a predator, but he’s certainly not the only one who has been allowed to run wild. His behavior, silently co-signed for decades by employees and collaborators, is a microcosm of what has been happening in Hollywood since always and of what workplace harassment looks like for women everywhere.