Anna Serner has heard plenty of bullshit excuses defending the lack of women directors hired to direct high-profile, big-budget projects. This fact was made abundantly clear at a recent event at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the CEO of the Swedish Film Institute (SFI) addressed a number of sexist myths surrounding female filmmakers — and she didn’t mince words.

For starters, she said that women directors aren’t offered big-budget gigs “because the production companies only still present male directors,” ScreenDaily reports. Not because women don’t have the desire to helm these kinds of movies or that they are too inexperienced. This is a problem that she and SFI’s 50–50 by 2020 initiative plan to tackle. When Serner took on the position of CEO in October 2011, she vowed to distribute state funds equally between male and female filmmakers with the 50–50 by 2020 program and has made good on her word.

“It’s amazing [this bias] still exists, we know female directors get big box office successes, higher [ROI] on those films. And yet they are seen as not experienced enough….You can have a guy who’s never made a film and he can get a big budget,” Serner observed. The source cites Janus Metz’s narrative directorial debut, tennis drama “Borg McEnroe,” as an example of this. It’s also dramatically more common for indie male directors to make big leaps into blockbuster projects — such as Colin Trevorrow with “Jurassic World” following “Safety Not Guaranteed” — than women filmmakers with more credits.

“If the industry doesn’t start working with us, I’m not afraid of quotas,” Serner said. “I think we’ve shown that they [women filmmakers] do deliver, so let them. The pure commercial money, they don’t give a shit, they want what they expect to be safe. That’s why I’m not leaving my position for a while.”