As the theater reporter at The Times, my job is to spot trends in the industry and in the art form, and to try to explain them. This one required some nuance, because there has long been a handful of women working as lead producers. But it seems clear that their numbers are growing significantly.

One of the most interesting things I noticed, in interviewing female producers — you can read my full article here — is that many of them had found new paths into the commercial theater business.

Whereas many male producers I meet tell me they learned the ropes as apprentices — working as assistants to established producers and learning by watching from the inside — many of the women honed their artistic and financial skills either at nonprofit theaters or at big entertainment companies before moving to Broadway.

Broadway still has a ways to go. Producers of color, of either gender, are few and far between — although there are exceptions, including Alia Jones-Harvey, whose projects have included Danai Gurira’s “Eclipsed” in 2016.

(As the winner of this year’s Tony Award for best director of a musical, Rachel Chavkin, said of the industry in her acceptance speech: “This is not a pipeline issue. It is a failure of imagination by a field whose job is to imagine the way the world could be.”)

But female producers are continuing to make strides. The new Broadway season, now getting underway, features multiple shows with women as lead producers, including the jukebox musicals “Moulin Rouge!” and “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” as well as “Diana,” an original musical about the British princess.

“There’s been such a change,” Julia Jordan, the executive director of the Lillys, an organization that works to promote gender parity in theater, told me. “Some sort of tipping point was reached this year.”