But the publishing industry is 78 percent female and, accolades or no, recent books from commercial publishers have offered up a bevy of leading women who are complex, unconventional, wholly human, and even triumphantly “unlikeable,” as Koa Beck wrote for The Atlantic last year. Many of them are getting a second life in film, and not just at the hands of Witherspoon. Rachel from Paula Hawkins’ thriller Girl On The Train, Ifemelu from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, and the two sisters from Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale will all soon grace the silver screen. Though from older works, Meg from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time and Esther Greenwood from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar are also getting the movie treatment over the next year. When they do, they’ll join a long tradition of nuanced female leads who’ve made the jump from literature to film, exemplified by works including Gone With the Wind, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Room, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Girl, Interrupted, Carrie, The Help, The Hours, Whale Rider, The Secret Life of Bees, and many others.

These new literary protagonists are bright spots in a Hollywood landscape where representation of women has been pretty bleak. Female leads, when they make it on-screen at all (less than 30 percent of the time), run a high risk of being over-sexualized, one-dimensional, and/or formulaic. This problem has roots in the gender breakdown of the industry: According to a 2016 study that examined over 100 movies released, in 2014 women made up 30 percent of screenwriters and just 3.4 percent of directors. Despite recent conversations around gender inequality, the response from Hollywood studios has been disappointingly uninventive: The all-female Ghostbusters and the forthcoming Oceans 11 are fine, but reimagining male characters as women doesn’t exactly represent radical change. And of the top-grossing movies of this year so far, only a small portion of them feature women in the starring role.

Big studio films do occasionally feature stereotype-defying female leads, as exemplified by Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. But independent cinema is generally better at tapping into underrepresented perspectives—for example, Mark Duplass’s hilarious and poignant Tangerine, the low-budget hit that follows two transgender women around L.A., or Trey Edward Schults’ acclaimed debut Krisha, whose eponymous lead is a gray-haired former addict trying to make good with her family. Even the indie world, though, is dominated by male writers and directors. As long as female filmmakers remain an anomaly, the variety of ways in which women are portrayed on screen will inevitably be limited.

Money is one place where the book and film industries most strikingly diverge. The process of actually writing a book—which, in fiction at least, typically happens before a publisher acquires it—is a solitary, low-budget affair. Even with the rise of the million-dollar book deal, the amount of money changing hands in publishing is paltry compared to the production of a feature film. In her 2002 book Women Who Run The Show, Mollie Gregory notes that while the phenomenal success in the 1970s of movies like Jaws, The Godfather, and Star Wars led to the big-budget “blockbuster,” it also made sexism more prominent in the industry. “Trusting women with budgets that big was not in the social context of the times,” she writes.