It started promisingly enough. After all, it was a woman, Alice Guy-Blaché, whom most credit as the first person to put a story on screen back in 1896. She went on to become one of cinema’s earliest pioneers.

More than a century later, though, women are hardly at the forefront. Go to see any film released nationally in the past week and it will almost certainly have been directed by a man. Of more than a dozen, only Agnès Varda’s autobiographical documentary The Beaches of Agnès had a woman at the helm. Next week will be little different: ten more films, only two by women, and again they are both documentaries.

That is no surprise to Rachel Millward, who founded Birds Eye View with director Pinny Grylls in 2002 while they were making short films together. “We both felt strongly about the lack of role models for us in the industry and when we became aware of the statistics — that just 7 per cent of film directors were women — we decided we wanted to take it on as an issue,” she says.

Initially, they toured the UK with programmes of short films by emerging female talent and guest speakers such as Greta Scacchi and Sally Phillips. In 2003 Grylls decided to refocus on directing, but Millward was hooked, and she relaunched Birds Eye View as the UK’s first major women’s film festival. It is now an important date on the film calendar and it has developed a range of programmes throughout the year to encourage women into film-making.

How much progress has been made in addressing the central problem is another question. The figures last year were more promising: 12 per cent of UK film titles released last year were directed by women and this year there are more high-profile releases. Sally Potter’s Rage, for instance, has attracted headlines for its innovation (it premiered on mobile phone), its distinctive style and a cast that includes Judi Dench, Eddie Izzard and Jude Law — in drag. Andrea Arnold, meanwhile, won the jury prize at Cannes with Fish Tank. And directors such as Kathryn Bigelow (of Point Break fame), whose Iraq war film The Hurt Locker, launched here in August, are proving that women can make it in Hollywood even in male-dominated genres.

“It’s slow progress, but women are breaking through,” says Christine Langan, creative director of BBC Films.

Women have made greater inroads in production. As well as Langan, there is Tessa Ross, controller of film and drama at Film 4, Tanya Seghatchian, head of the UK Film Council’s Development Fund and Sally Caplan, in charge of its Premiere Fund.

“I don’t think people would dare to be overtly sexist in the way they were when I was younger,” Potter says. But women can still be treated differently. There are quite a few who make just one or two features but are then abandoned by the studios if they are not an unqualified success.

Langlan says: “It is all about precedent and, sometimes, people in the film world can be very conservative, You need fairly heroic figures to break the mould.”