When Taapsee Pannu turned producer last year with Outsiders Films, one knew that she would take brave stories to the audience. But her desire to effect change wasn’t restricted to the screen. As an actor who had seen the on-ground reality and called out many gender-biased norms of the industry — from the vast pay gap, to leading ladies being dropped from films at the nth hour — Pannu understood that she was now in a position to lead change. She started it with a small but significant step on the sets of her productions Blurr, starring Gulshan Devaiah and her, and Dhak Dhak, which stars Ratna Pathak Shah, Dia Mirza, Fatima Sana Shaikh and Sanjana Sanghi. 

The new producer insisted on uniform-sized vanity vans for all actors, regardless of their gender, experience or screen time, thus subverting the age-old idea of the leading man being given the biggest vanity van on the set. She begins, “During my initial years in the industry, I saw actresses being given small vanity vans. The big double-door vanity was reserved for [male] actors or supporting actors. This, when the number of things a hair and make-up person has to carry for a female actor is relatively more than that for a male actor. It would get claustrophobic, hardly looking like a place where an artiste could relax. This inequality bothered me a lot. I was too new back then to raise an issue.”