Adam Quigley's rebuttal is extremely misguided. Has he considered that if female directors were given the chance to helm big-budget projects, maybe they'd be successful?

To be fair, the soccer analogy isn't a great one because it ignores the social pressures that discourage the other girls from playing with the boys.  Alexander's essay has some flaws but the overall point is fairly incontrovertible.   Quigley acknowledges and then ignores the actual issue to the detriment of the position he claims to support. 

Of course Hollywood has a white male director problem.

Hollywood is, despite occasional claims to the contrary, risk-averse. This means going with tried-and-tested. And 99% of the time, this means white male directors. It's a self-perpetuating cycle. I don't really see this as something that can be debated with ambiguity.

The thing worth discussing, I think, is how exactly to achieve an actual equality of opportunity. I remember somebody (half-certain it was Geena Davis) saying that if you look at a crowd scene, it's only about 20% female. There's nothing stopping us from having it be 50/50 (and, sidenote, shouldn't this be easier to do, considering women generally get paid less than men anyway?). This is non-speaking, relatively passive work, and we can't even get that right. Pretty disheartening. So having fairer proportions of male/female directors isn't going to be easy to do.

I'm sure that this is a top-down (white males at the top make most of the decisions) and bottom-up (less women pursue directing, maybe?) problem, though.

About that last point. A question, for those of you who went to film school: roughly what was the female/male ratio?

Disclaimer: if you dislike the tone of a post I make, re-read it in a North/East London accent until it sounds sufficiently playful