The 2017 awards season has been defined by activism from the women of Hollywood. From #MeToo to Time’s Up, the movement to end sexual harassment and inequality in the entertainment industry has become a specific, tangible effort.

As a result of these past few months, inequality in the movie industry will be in the crosshairs as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hands out its annual awards on Sunday. But the very makeup of the academy itself offers no better example of how much more progress is needed.

For the entirety of its 90 years, the organization has mirrored an industry that’s been dominated by men. In the past several years, though, the academy has made some specific membership moves to change the composition of the group to more accurately reflect both the industry and society as a whole. Most recently, the academy invited 774 people to join its ranks in 2017, and 39 percent were women; this combined with the membership drive of 2016 to make the organization go from 75 percent male in 2015 to 72 percent male in 2017. Change will be slow. But these kinds of efforts could have profound effects on the organization — and on whom it chooses to honor at the Oscars.

Exact data regarding gender composition over time isn’t available. In lieu of this information, I reached out to the academy library and asked for the next best thing. I wanted to look back at the board of governors of the academy, the people elected by the membership to lead each branch, to see how historically women were or were not able to rise to leadership positions in their field.

With the list from the Margaret Herrick Library in hand, I looked up the gender of each person who served either on the board or as an officer of the group for any period of time in each turn. The results were staggering — if not surprising.

Women made up well less than 20 percent of academy board members and officers for seven decades, including a 12-year stretch in the 1960s and ’70s with no women on the board. It wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that female representation in leadership reached even that modest 20 percent benchmark. On a month-by-month basis, academy leadership has been less than 20 percent women for 92 percent of the months it has existed, and half the time was less than 6 percent women. Only within the past five years did the academy’s board of governors and executives rise above a quarter women.

If the academy itself looked anything like its leadership — a safe assumption considering that we know it’s currently hovering around three-quarters male — then it’s fair to assume men have overwhelmingly controlled which films are nominated at the Oscars and which films eventually won. Has that male skew affected which films are nominated and/or win? That’s a complicated question to answer — we are looking into it.

Just to set a baseline, though: It’s certainly true that some movies elicit different reactions, on average, from men and women. There have been 546 movies nominated for best picture since the Academy Awards began, and IMDb has user ratings for 540 of them.