For her part, Davis has a reputation for making empowered, counter-intuitive choices. She is probably best known as Thelma Dickinson, the radicalised anti-hero in Ridley Scotts 1991 feminist box-office smash, Thelma & Louise, or as the feisty Dottie Hinson in the 1992 womens baseball movie, A League of Their Own.
Having been in some roles that really resonated with women, I became hyper-aware of how women are represented in Hollywood, she says.
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Patricia Arquette used her Oscars acceptance speech in March to issue a rallying cry for equal pay top-earning female dramatic actors take home around 40% of the salaries of their male co-stars. In April, Carey Mulligan, who stars in the forthcoming Suffragette, the story of 19th-century campaigners fighting for womens right to vote, called the movie industry massively sexist. That same month, her co-star Meryl Streep announced she was funding a screenwriters lab for women writers over 40. In May, the actor Elizabeth Banks, who had just directed her first feature, Pitch Perfect 2, admitted there were systemic problems regarding gender inequality in the movie business. In July, Emma Thompson claimed that some forms of sexism and unpleasantness to women have become more entrenched and indeed more prevalent. Earlier this month, Anne Hathaway told the New York Times that, professionally speaking, she had been treated differently because I was a woman.
Has Davis ever experienced sexism in the industry?
Yeah, you know, Ive definitely seen sexism on the set, though not that much directed at me. Shes been lucky, she says. The only thing that comes to mind is an occasion when a director commented on how much he enjoyed hugging her each morning because: Its the only chance I get to feel you up.
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Success stories such as Kathryn Bigelow, who was the first woman to win the Academy Award for best director with The Hurt Locker (2009) are extremely rare (and when I ask one Hollywood producer why Bigelow broke through where others did not, he replies without missing a beat: Because she was married to [Titanic director] James Cameron. They knew if she fucked it up, he could step in and save the day. This in spite of the fact the couple had divorced several years before she made the film in question). In fact, the proportion of female directors handed the reins on the highest-grossing films has actually fallen over the past 17 years, and only 5% of cinematographers are women. The same study revealed that a paltry 19.9% of female characters were 40 to 64 years old.
At 59, Davis is familiar with the crushing silence of a phone that never rings. Women in film are, she says definitely discriminated against because of their age.
I was averaging about one movie a year my whole career and that was because Im fussy. I probably could have done more. And then in my 40s I made one movie
And I was positive it wasnt going to happen to me because I got a lot of great parts for women. I was very fortunate to have all that stuff happen and never get typecast, so I was just cruising along thinking: Well yeah, it wont happen to me. It did.
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When Daviss daughter Alizeh was born in 2002 she started noticing something else: when she watched animated or childrens films, Davis was struck by the lack of female characters on show.
It was really shocking, she says. I first just mentioned it to my friends and said, Did you notice in that movie that just came out there was only one female creature in the whole movie? Besides the mother who dies in the first five minutes? And none of them had noticed. Feminist friends, mothers of daughters, none of them noticed until I pointed it out.
She started talking to studio bosses and industry figures. Across the board, she was told gender representation was not a problem. It had been fixed: And very often they would name a movie with one female character as proof.
So Davis sponsored the largest ever study on gender depictions in family-rated films and childrens television (I take everything too far, she admits). The research spanned a 20-year period. It found that for every female speaking character there were three males, while female characters made up just 17% of crowd scenes.
I told somebody that just the other day and they said, Well it seems like youd have to work at making it that few, Davis says with a chuckle.
Her point is that even in a fictional setting, created from our collective 21st-century imagination, we seem subconsciously or otherwise to believe a 17% female representation is the natural state of affairs.
That ratio is everywhere, Davis says. US congress? 17% women. Fortune 500 boards are 17%. Law partners and tenured professors and military are 17% female. Cardiac surgeons are 17%. Thats the percentage of women in the Animation Guild. Journalists, print journalists, are 19% women.
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The director Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, We Need to Talk About Kevin) cites a handful of occasions when a predominantly male crew would underestimate her because of her diminutive height and would call her bitchy or bossy where a male director would simply be regarded as assertive.
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That seems odd, given the preponderance of films in recent years featuring strong female leads, such as Trainwreck, Bridesmaids, The Hunger Games franchise or even Mamma Mia!. But, says Davis: In fact, the ratio of male to female characters has been exactly the same since 1946. So all the times that the press has announced that now things are better, or now things are changing, they havent.
There always comes a point where theyre trying to spot a trend, which would be great. The year that Mamma Mia! and Sex and the City were both gigantic hits internationally [the media were saying] Now, beyond a doubt, weve proven giant summer blockbusters with women will change [the industry]
Nothing changed.
And it happened to me twice. Thats how I became aware of the phenomenon. After Thelma & Louise, which was pretty noticed and potent and significant, [people were saying] This changes everything! Theres going to be so many female buddy movies! and nothing changed. And then the next movie I did was A League of Their Own, which was a huge hit and all the talk was, Well now, beyond a doubt, womens sports movies, were going to see a wave of them because this was so successful. Thats balls. It took 10 years until Bend It Like Beckham came out. So, there was no trend whatsoever.
It keeps happening, and we keep falling for this notion that now theres Bridesmaids, now theres Hunger Games
She trails off. It hasnt started a trend.
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With the bar already set much higher for female directors than male, they are also given fewer second chances. Women with a box office failure dont get hired again. Even when they succeed, they struggle: Lisa Cholodenko received four Academy Awards nominations for The Kids Are All Right in 2011, including one for best picture. Afterwards, she was rewarded with almost exclusively small-screen offers.
Mimi Leder directed the sci-fi disaster flick, Deep Impact in 1998, then took time off to have a child. She returned with the box-office flop, Pay It Forward in 2000 a move that, by her own admission, landed her in movie jail. Since then, she too has been directing TV shows.
If a movie starring or written by or directed by a man flops, people dont blame the gender of the creator, the writer and director Diablo Cody told Variety magazine last July. Its just kind of weird how the blame is always immediately placed on female directors.
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Is that a particularly female trait: not wanting to cause trouble and needing, above all, to be liked?
Yeah. [Its] I dont want you to think I have needs or anything. I was very, very, very much that way.
Of course there is no simple solution to the endemic problem of the under-representation of women in film. Davis is not a fan of quotas for the creative industries but she says one of the easiest ways to make an impact is to smash the psychological barrier of 17% on screen and to start doing that now.
The one area where we could reach parity overnight is on screen, absolutely overnight
My two-pronged solution to the entire problem is just before you cast a film or a TV show, go through the characters and change a bunch of first names to female hooray! Now youve got a gender-balanced cast, youve got female characters who are un-stereotyped because they were written actually for a man and then, wherever it says, a crowd gathers, put which is half female. And thatll happen.
Her suggestion is a valid one: the more representations there are of women doing interesting or unexpected or powerful things, the more we become culturally acclimatised.
I really think if we change what kids see from the beginning, it will change how they grow up, Davis says. You know, were creating problems that we have to solve later
If we show them that women take up half the space and boys and girls share the sandbox equally from the beginning, it will change everything.
In 2005, Davis starred in a TV drama called Commander in Chief in which she played a female president. True, she ascends to the post from vice-president after the incumbent dies in office the gender-blindness didnt extend so far as to suggest a woman could actually have been elected but she did win a Golden Globe for best actress.
I was only in office for one season I had a tragically short administration, says Davis (who, incidentally, is a Hillary Clinton supporter in the race for US president). But they did a survey afterwards that showed that people were 63% more likely to vote for a female candidate for president.
The part where one example of a female-led movie is cited as "proof" that "sexism is over" is such a painfully common argument when it comes to discussing representation in video games, for instance. 
