Gellman works closely with the director, LSA senior Yaqi Ge.

“I’m lucky to be working on ‘Fender Bender’ with Yaqi because, really, it’s a woman team,” Gellman said.

When Ge was five, she watched “Toy Story” for the first time. Immediately after, she turned to her mom and said that this is what she wants to do; she wants to make animated movies.

Ge is used to working in male-dominated settings. In addition to her involvement in film, she is double-majoring in computer science, another field with a disproportionately high number of men.

“Most of my computer science classes have only two or three girls,” Ge said. “Sometimes I feel a little bit uncomfortable.”

Working with so many women on “Fender Bender” has created a noticeably different working atmosphere, Ge explained.

“You just feel more comfortable with other girls,” she said. “You think in the same way; it feels easier.”

She mentioned that, in some ways, animation is a more open field for female artists. When she worked at an animation conference one summer, Ge was surprised to see so many women involved.

Women often work as producers on animated features, but female directors are still uncommon. While Brenda Chapman’s spot in the three-member directing team of “Brave” was a step in the right direction, it didn’t come without its obstacles. Pixar fired Chapman halfway through production for undisclosed “creative differences,” leaving two men to spin the tale of the production company’s first female lead.

LSA senior Christina Bender expressed a similar comfort in working with other women.

Bender, who has been involved with University student-run film studio Filmic Productions since its inception, took an interest in film before coming to the University. In high school, she attended a film camp at the Motion Pictures Institute of Michigan. When she arrived, she was the only girl.

“It was really weird,” Bender said. “I kind of felt funny about it.”

Though her first experience was shocking, Bender said she has become more accustomed to working mostly with men.

Then, last year, she had the opportunity to work as a production assistant for a female producer.

“It was so wonderful to have a woman as a mentor, and people kept telling me how lucky I was,” Bender said. “She was so sweet and so nice, and I heard so many stories of other people’s experiences of being a producer’s assistant that weren’t as positive.”

Though she was fortunate to have a female mentor, Bender explained that the rest of the crew was male-dominated and that she still observed a subtle sexism.

“I don’t know if it’s super sexist, but just the way that they talk,” she said, “They call you ‘sweetie’ and that kind of stuff. It wasn’t anything like groping or anything, just comments.”

“I think that there is just a deep and abiding sexism that’s part of your life from the moment that you’re conscious as a female. And you are afraid to step into the idea that you could be an authority figure, that you could be a boss, that you have a vision that other people should listen to you on a set … and I think that you therefore don’t allow yourself access to the dream of being a director.”
- Liz Garcia, Sundance Film Festival Women Directors’ Roundtable, Jan. 16, 2013

Though a dominantly female creative team backs Gellman and Ge, there aren’t very many female students who come into the film course as determined to direct as Gellman is.

“I think there probably is a subconscious level of ‘oh, that’s a man’s job,’ ” she said.

However, women do tend to fill other positions on creative teams. In particular, there have been many successful female editors.

Patrice Petro, vice provost for international education at the University of Wisconsin, has written several books on film theory and history. She offered scholar B.