Women artists need to break barriers in order for women's experience to be valuable.

Men and women who have served in harm's way experience higher rates of divorce and suicide. Many battle the debilitating effects and stigma associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I think how pay gets determined is pretty broad - experience how people look what they bring to the job. But there's no question women are paid less. Women don't ask.

One nice thing about being a woman in Hollywood is that the women tend to be very close-knit. All of us writers and directors know each other and cling to each other for safety and support and it's really a completely different vibe than the men experience out here where they're all trying to murder each other.

You know it shouldn't just be about women as heroic figures overcoming things it just needs to be about women in general getting the opportunity to play a multitude of roles telling a multitude of stories - just to express human experience from a woman's perspective. I hope someday we can get to that point. I'm all about representation.

I had the experience last year of directing my first feature while I had a 1-year-old son and while I was also pregnant so I am now well aware of the difficulties women who are rearing children face when they're also trying to make headway in mainstream of film.

I hate it when people don't recognize the work of women as being universal or having any import to the world at large as opposed to men's work which is generally tends to be seen as more universal - men's writing about their own experience tends to be put in a broader context.

You can't leave out half the world's experience and expect to address all the problems. Women communicate differently and process information differently which leads them to resolve conflicts differently.

That's not to say that women's priorities are better than men's. Rather when women are empowered when they can speak from the experience of their own lives they often address different previously neglected issues. And families and whole communities benefit.

Women love working together. That's my experience anyway.