The woman behind the hugely successful new BBC drama Parade's End is leading a campaign to give female directors a better deal in television.

Susanna White, whose adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's four-volume novel is winning widespread acclaim, is a member of Directors UK, a group representing British film and television directors, which has set up an all-women working party to examine the difficulties experienced by aspiring female directors. The move is partly a response to the fact that no women were entered for the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes film festival.

White told the Observer that she had only broken into the top ranks of directors with extreme difficulty. "I think my journey has been a very, very, slow one."

Welcoming the new focus, she said: "I'm very keen for this to happen. We really thought it needed addressing."

White said gender stereotypes still plague the industry, with directors assumed to be domineering types. "It is partly about people's images of leadership. With directors, it's about a powerful person in charge, a George Clooney figure, [but] you don't have to be tall and loud to be a director; there are other models.

"A lot is riding on the power and input of the director. You are the one to coax the performances out of the actors. Directors control every aspect of the script, from the wallpaper to casting. I think women are uniquely qualified to do that because we are brilliant at multitasking."

White was selected as best newcomer in 1987 by Broadcast, the industry magazine, on the basis of a documentary film, but she was only nominated as best new director by Women in Film & Television, an international creative media organisation, in 2009, after making Generation Kill for HBO – produced by Andrea Calderwood, with an all-male cast – and two period dramas.

Despite winning a Fulbright scholarship to study film at UCLA after graduating from Oxford University, she failed to win a place on a BBC training scheme and was turned down for a BBC drama director trainee course in 1999 after 12 years spent making well-received documentaries for BBC2. "I remember someone on the selection panel saying, 'What makes you think you can control 100 people?'"

She was supported second time around by BBC2 controller Jane Root, who eased her into drama in 2001 with a £200,000 budget drama for BBC2, Love Again, about Philip Larkin. Producer Nigel Stafford-Clark saw it and engaged her as director for BBC1's Bleak House. She also directed Jane Eyre in 2006, starring Ruth Wilson, and the film Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang in 2010.

Delyth Thomas, who directed CBBC's Tracy Beaker, is on the board of Directors UK and part of its women's working group. She said: "It is certainly the case that careers in directing are different for women than men." Women, she said, "tended to move sideways rather than up the chain". This meant they could miss out on the most lucrative work. "I have turned up on productions to be met with a gasp, 'Oh my God, you're a woman'… so I look at my tits and say, 'Yes, I am!'"

Calderwood, who is managing director of Slate Films, said momentum was building in favour of women, but all directors needed enormous confidence. "You do have to be able to stand up in front of 150 people and say, 'This is the way we're doing it, my way'. You don't need to scream and shout. There isn't a bias against women, but you need an almost maniacal approach. Film sets are the most hierarchical place in the world, where only one person's opinion matters."

White also believes that gender counts when it comes to on-screen interpretation: she introduced sympathetic overtones to the main female characters in Parade's End, and adjusted Sir Tom Stoppard's script to include a suffragette protest in the first episode.

Sylvia, the wife of uptight Christopher Tietjens (Benedict Cumberbatch), who is played by Rebecca Hall, was once described by Graham Greene as "surely the most possessed evil character in the modern novel… a witchwife". But she is portrayed by White as a trapped, vulnerable woman.

"She could have been a harridan figure. I made her multilayered, a victim of circumstances. It's a big change from the book."