HOLLYWOOD — MAYBE because I have seven nieces whose dreams matter to me, maybe because I have so many female friends whose talents dazzle me, or maybe just because I think it’s madness not to encourage and recognize the full potential of half of the human race, I keep looking to the movies for something better. For something more equitable. For women saving the world or saving the president or at the very least saving themselves.

Every so often I get my wish. This year it actually happened several times. The astronaut fighting to survive in “Gravity,” the kind of effects-laden extravaganza that typically drowns in testosterone, was played by Sandra Bullock. And in “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” Jennifer Lawrence returned as Katniss Everdeen, the stoic, steely archer on whom nothing less than the hope for a livable tomorrow rests. Both movies made buckets of money, proving that audiences had no trouble, none at all, with a woman leading the way.

But around the same time that I savored this happy turn, I read some less happy news: Wonder Woman was finally en route to the silver screen — but not, alas, in a vehicle of her own. She’s slated to be an appendix to Superman and Batman in a sequel to “Man of Steel.” For all I know she’ll be zipping out to Starbucks for their lattes or the dry cleaner’s to fetch their capes. Meantime, producers scrape the bottom of the superhero barrel for male demigods to put in the foreground and the title. Just last week Variety disclosed that Paul Rudd was in talks to play “Ant-Man.” Yes, “Ant-Man.” “The Green Hornet,” “Spider-Man” — maybe Wonder Woman isn’t insect enough for the major leagues. Maybe she needs to make like a mantis.

For decades now a Wonder Woman movie has been chattered about, longed for, plotted, scuttled. The director and writer Joss Whedon took a failed stab at one after he did “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” on TV and before he included Scarlett Johansson in “The Avengers.” At this point it’s not so much an unrealized project as an ongoing taunt: a metaphor for the stubborn gender gap in the sorts of action-oriented blockbusters that rule the box office; proof that the more things change, the more they remain the same, at least in Hollywood, whose superficially progressive politics mask overwhelmingly conservative business instincts.