At the close of the Reagan/Bush era, Aaron Sorkin’s military courtroom drama A Few Good Men (1992) rocked the international box-office with roughly $240 million.

In Sorkin’s cinematic treatise on the valedictory pursuit of honor, the careers of several Marines hang on whether JAG lawyer Lt. Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise, in his tantrum throwing best) can become the fine attorney his father once was and successfully defend his clients at a court martial hearing.

Much of Kaffee’s formulaic plotline parallels nicely with the 1992 ethos in which the United States’ central narrative focused on post-Cold War patriotism, Operation Desert Storm, and an improving economy. The idea of limitless victory still captivated the imagination, while ongoing stagnancy in various areas of social justice are represented as relative subplots.

By correlation, Kaffee’s mistreatment of his female co-counsel, Lt. Commander Joanne Galloway (Demi Moore), makes him emerge as an honorable legal eagle by the end of the film. Even prior to the hearing’s commencement, Kaffee sexually harasses Galloway after he finishes off an All-American morning of softball practice and chocolate milk:

As the hearing proceeds, neither Kaffee nor his co-counsel Sam (Kevin Pollack) makes any egregious errors in the courtroom. Galloway, on the other hand, is continuously spotlighted for her serious professional shortcomings — she doesn’t prep a witness well, she bumbles her objections, and she flip-flops on whether Kaffee should cross-examine a key witness.

For this, Galloway becomes the target of Kaffee and Sam’s wrath. Sam, ever the gentle father-figure to Kaffee when he acts in an unprofessional manner, rips into Galloway for being “absent during the day they taught law in law school.”

Later on, soused and belligerent during a trial prep-session, Kaffee screams at Galloway for being “galactically stupid.” After Galloway leaves the room on the verge of tears, Sam and Kaffee proceed to have a drink and a warm fireside chat about Kaffee’s potential for trial law greatness.

Of course, jerks like Sam and Kaffee exist in the world. But what’s more dispiriting is, in Sorkin’s world, Galloway must endure the men’s piddling insults because Kaffee is a luminary attorney and his father’s heir to win the big case. So long as Kaffee realizes his potential, which of course he does, Galloway not only tolerates his improprieties, but helps to celebrate them as parts of Kaffee’s fiery, can-do personality that will lead the law team to victory.

Nearly 25 years have passed since the theatrical release of A Few Good Men. During that span, the U.S. has overseen significant — though not sufficient — movements to support gender equality in the military, workplace, and education. Social media has relentlessly pushed to the forefront many of the lingering gender-based inequalities, including those within the arts.

Unsurprisingly, Hollywood has resisted these emerging changes, particularly when it comes to its treatment of female actors and its writing of female characters in leading roles, particularly those of color.

A primary example of Hollywood’s failure to emerge from its anachronistic chrysalis is Aaron Sorkin’s relentlessly social-conservative voice which, since 2010, has produced three big-budget Oscar contenders on America’s most trending contemporaneous topics: The Social Network (on the creation of Facebook and social media itself), Moneybag (about a stat-geek takeover in professional sports), and most recently, Steve Jobs (on the infamous co-founder of Apple).

But while these films chart our country’s breathless revolution into the tech-age, the gender dynamics in each has changed little since A Few Good Men.

Sure enough, Sorkin is “on point” with his subject matter. He captures well our decade’s obsession with tech-empire building at the expense of a simpler if not more fulfilling contentment in The Now. To illustrate this, he depicts his characters as razor-sharp, left-brainers who talk at blistering paces with little room for empathy or introspective. This dialogue is intended to be exclusionary so that lesser mortals who miss a beat — like the reliable but not Road Runner-fast Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) in The Social Network — are quickly left out in the cold.

That’s all well and good, except in each Sorkin treatise from this decade, his female characters merely orbit a pseudo-biographical, male protagonist’s quest for Greatness.

Remarkably, in both Moneyball and The Social Network, not one woman character has considerable decision-making power in the men’s clubs that shape the future of our workplaces.

In Steve Jobs, Sorkin portrays Apple’s marketing exec Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet) as an ideal combination of intelligence, efficiency, and “tough love.” However, the vast majority of Hoffman’s gripes is that Jobs needs to treat his daughter Lisa (Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo, and Perla Haney-Jardine representing different ages) and his daughter’s mother, Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterson), with greater care.

While Hoffman is a nice complimentary element to keep the film from becoming too cold and thorny, her own professional ambitions and conflicts go unexplored. As to Jobs’ ex-girlfriend, Chrisann: outside of her demands that Steve take on more parental responsibilities, her worldview is largely ignored — this, even though she had an interesting and successful career as a painter and muralist.