Jessica Chastain

This is an industry rife with racism, sexism and homophobia. It is so closely woven into the fabric of the business that we have become snowblind to the glaring injustices happening every day.

I just want to see more women in film and behind the camera. I'm tired of seeing movies from one perspective.

We know in our society, women are valued for their sexual desirability and not necessarily for what they have to say.

It's tough, acting. You have to walk two lines of a tightrope. There's the all-consuming fear of failure: I'm about to fall flat on my face. There's that and there's also confidence - you have to be confident in order to try things - and they fight each other all the time.

I'm not taking jobs anymore where I'm getting paid a quarter of what the male co-star is being paid. I'm not allowing that in my life.

It's a fact, the majority of films in Hollywood are from the male perspective. And the female characters, very rarely do they get to speak to another female character in a movie, and when they do it's usually about a guy, not anything else. So they're very male-centric, Hollywood films, in general. So I think it's incredible that Ned Benson, when I said I'd love to know where she goes, says okay, I'm going to write another film from the female perspective.

I find it very interesting: when 90 percent of the critics that review films are men, how is that helpful when trying to create stories from a feminine point of view?

What's wrong with trying hard and showing up and being good at your job? We really need to look at ourselves and say we need to reevaluate this. We need to reevaluate that women who ask for a pay raise or ask for a promotion - it's actually an okay thing. It's okay to be ambitious; it's okay to be over-prepared.

If you're one of the only women on a set - if it's you and a bunch of men - you feel like your value doesn't come from your thoughts and your talent and what you say: your value comes from how you look and how you're perceived by the men around you.

My goal is that a girl will watch 'The Martian' or 'Interstellar' and think, 'I want to be an astronaut or a quantum physicist.' It's important to show powerful women who are good at their jobs because young girls need those examples.

What can I do to create a healthy work environment? Because we have all been groomed to the normalization of violence and the normalization of abuse. And we refuse to live in that society.

We have grown up watching women be used as props on a man's journey. It's not our fault that that's what we saw as children. But we need to acknowledge that and do better.

We need to understand that femininity is not weakness. And our society, for some reason, equates the two.