In the 1930s and ’40s, if an aspiring female animator wanted to work at Disney — then one of the few games in town — she would find herself relegated to the studio’s ink and paint department, where she would be limited to tracing and coloring the work of an all-male animation team. “Women,” reads one rejection letter from the time, “do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen.”

Years later, in 1961, Walt Disney co-founded California Institute of the Arts, a school intended to be a feeder to Disney and the industry. In the 1970s and ’80s, CalArts went on to attract some of animation’s most influential names. There were Tim Burton (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Batman) and Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille), Henry Selick (Coraline, James and the Giant Peach) and John Lasseter, chief creative officer of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios. Annie Leibovitz memorialized them in a 2014 photo for Vanity Fair — 17 men in all. Dead center were the photo’s only two women, Leslie Gorin and Brenda Chapman.

Today one sees a very different picture in the CalArts hallways. At last count, more than 70 percent of the animation students on the Valencia campus were female. But even with similar numbers of women at the other local animation schools — 69 percent at UCLA, 55 percent at USC — women still hold fewer than a quarter of the union jobs in the animation industry here. The disparity has sparked a movement to close the gap: The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media at Mount Saint Mary’s University tracks the number of female characters in animated features, while the West L.A.-based organization Women in Animation pursues gender parity with its “50/50 by 2025” initiative.