Why famous, popular female directors show women poorly

Zoya and Farah both top 2 female directors of mainstream hindi movies who are established never had main character as female. Farah is worst all her movies are hero centric with slezy item songs. the heroines never had equal space always had less screenspace same with Zoya. ZNMD could have been on female friends but she too chose a male bonding. Kat and Kalki had less than half of importance and screenspace. Even DDD had more of Anil and Ranveer than PC. PC character needed a man Farhan to get courage to be strong to break off from her hubby Rahul in the movie. Anushka was just for songs didnt even get a nice ending. Farhan had the meatier role important to other characters. So why is that so? why cant women directors try something new with female characters? infact all strong roles recently of all current actresses had male directors.

Internalized patriarchy.

It's because they want money, and if they want money, they have to adhere to the prevailing social norms. Unfortunately, they do exactly what the male directors do, because they know their films won't sell otherwise.

In DDD, Zoya tried to emphasise the independence of a woman through PC's character, but I don't think that part was received well by the audience. Until and unless the audience changes, directors, whether male or female, will not lead social change, especially commercial directors. There are other female directors who direct not-so-well-known films who depict strong women.

The sad truth is, if Farah were to make a film that portrayed strong female characters, it would not be the kind of hit HNY was or BB was.

Their sole purpose is to gain money not alleviating the status of women in the country...

I don't think its only about money

Originally posted by: GundayVedant

I don't think its only about money

Farah and Zoya are writers and such male-centric naturally comes to them. You can't hammer their creative process only because it doesn't have a prominent female character in it. Just replace ZNMD with all female cast, it would have been kinda disaster, Male equations are drastically different from female ones..

Talking of DDD, I blame the audience to have such limited thought, to think that character like Ayesha doesn't exist at all is ridiculous!

Such people are omnipresent in every society, culture!

@bold- Why would it have been a disaster?

Also, we should explore WHY directors like them visualise male-centric stories and why they come 'naturally' to them. I don't think it's that natural. Rather, they know that a normal story with a woman as the protagonist would automatically be called a 'chick flick' and one not meant for the general audience. Movies which happen to have a female lead are still not accepted as 'regular movies', unfortunately.

but so many hits we have by male directors with strong female characters why is it hard for the female directors? Anand Rai is a male, Soojit, Anurag basu, vikas behl all males.

Originally posted by: clarity

@bold- Why would it have been a disaster?

Also, we should explore WHY directors like them visualise male-centric stories and why they come 'naturally' to them. I don't think it's that natural. Rather, they know that a normal story with a woman as the protagonist would automatically be called a 'chick flick' and one not meant for the general audience. Movies which happen to have a female lead are still not accepted as 'regular movies', unfortunately.

First of all Zoya Akhtar is so over-rated as a director. I watched ZNMD again last night on my Eros susbscription... viewing only the director's work and it was awful. The film is style over substance. Ironically the best thing about the film is Kalki Koechlin's character.