FOR those rooting for women to make strides in Hollywood the news that Brenda Chapman, a screenwriter and director of “Brave,” had been replaced at the helm midway through production of that animated film about the flame-haired archer came as a blow last year. The happy ending is that the movie on which Ms. Chapman shares directing credit (with Mark Andrews) ranks eighth at the box office in 2012.

Even happier: 9 percent of the top 250 movies at the domestic box office last year were made by female directors. That’s substantially higher than the 2011 figure of 5 percent. Martha Lauzen — the San Diego State University professor whose annual Celluloid Ceiling report tracks the employment of women in the movie industry — said the 2012 figure was the highest since 2000, when 11 percent were made by female directors. (The percentages were based on the year’s top 250 films according to boxofficemojo.com. In cases involving more than one director, as with “Brave,” “Ruby Sparks” and other films, a third or half proportion was assigned.)

The storyteller’s gender matters. When more than nine-tenths of movies are made from the male perspective, said B. Ruby Rich, the film critic and professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, “it unconsciously reinforces the invisibility of women.” A 2011 University of Southern California study examining the top 100 box office releases between 2007 and 2009 found that in films directed by men, 29 percent of the characters were female; in those by women 48 percent of the characters were.

A scan of the 2012 films by women shows a broad spectrum of genres and styles. There are fact-based thrillers by veteran directors like Kathryn Bigelow (“Zero Dark Thirty”) and Agnieszka Holland (“In Darkness”). There are off-center comedies by rookies like Jennifer Westfeldt (“Friends With Kids”) and Lorene Scafaria (“Seeking a Friend for the End of the World”). There is the faith-based “Woman Thou Art Loosed: On the Seventh Day,” Neema Barnette’s redemption story of a family in crisis.