Jill Soloway on Hollywood’s Woman Problem: ‘I’m Starting to Think They’re Doing It on Purpose’

Jill Soloway, the Emmy-winning showrunner behind Amazon’s Transparent and one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People of 2015, used to think Hollywood executives’ failure to hire more women in positions of authority was an accident. Not anymore. “I’m starting to think they’re doing it on purpose,” she tells Reza Aslan, the best-selling author of Zealot and No god But God, on the forthcoming Rough Draft with Reza Aslan, premiering Feb. 28 on Ovation TV.

In this exclusive clip, Soloway speaks to Aslan, who is also a TV producer and a professor, about the need to hold Hollywood responsible for hiring more women. She discusses the tendency to pigeonhole female characters into reductive opposites—“the madonna or the whore, the good girl or the bad girl”—and how to repair that “divided feminine.”

Aslan’s five-part, weekly series will focus on the writer’s life, featuring guests like Soloway, All In the Family creator Norman Lear and The Leftovers and Lost showrunner Damon Lindelof, as well as musicians including Ingrid Michaelson. Soloway’s full interview will air on March 6.