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LOS ANGELES — Most mornings, Nina Jacobson drives her gray 2012 Tesla from her home in Brentwood to her office in Santa Monica with her two Australian shepherds, Hero and Pearl, in the back seat.

As she pushes through the traffic, she takes calls via speakerphone from fellow producers, agents, studio executives, directors and the occasional pal like Carrie Fisher, with whom she shares a yearly birthday soiree.

Ms. Jacobson, 51, is the founder and boss of Color Force, the boutique-size film production company behind the $2.9 billion “Hunger Games” franchise. On a recent morning, she parked the Tesla across the street from the one-story building where she works with a staff of seven and growing.

Before getting out of the car, she finished a call with her partner at Color Force, Brad Simpson, who was in Atlanta keeping watch on the fourth installment of the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” film series, which has earned $225 million globally at the box office.

When Ms. Jacobson opened the car door, the two dogs bounded out of the back seat.

“I said when I got fired I could bring my dogs to work,” she said.

She was referring to the low point of her career, when she was booted in 2006 from her job as president of Disney’s Buena Vista Motion Pictures Group despite having overseen one of that decade’s signature franchises, the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series. She bounced back quickly, though, establishing Color Force in 2007.

She and her dogs passed through a wooden gate and went inside. The interior had the feel of a tech start-up, with concrete floors, a kitchen and lots of open space. Twelve black-and-white portraits of “Hunger Games” characters took prime position on a wall outside her office, with Jennifer Lawrence, looking regal as the fierce heroine Katniss Everdeen, in the center.

That blockbuster franchise fits perfectly with what Ms. Jacobson is trying to accomplish in a male-dominated industry: to bring to the screen stories centered on women and others underrepresented in movies. Among the projects she has in the works are adaptations of the novels “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt and “Crazy Rich Asians” by Kevin Kwan, and for television, the “American Crime Story” series, which explores race, society and culture.

In late October, Ms. Jacobson met with the screenwriter Christina Hodson, recently hired by Warner Bros. to write a reboot of the 1993 action hit “The Fugitive,” who had an appointment to go over a script in development at Color Force that centered on a mythological tribe of women warriors who invade ancient Greece.

Before they got down to discussing characters and story beats, Ms. Hodson described a run-in she had at the Austin Film Festival, where she was on a panel to discuss women and movies.

“This guy puts his hand up and says: ‘First of all, let me just say, I love women. Don’t mix me up with other guys,’” Ms. Hodson recalled. After his little preamble, the screenwriter said, the man went on to ask Ms. Hodson, who is half-Asian and was raised in London, if she owed her success more to the film industry’s attempts to hire women and minorities than to her own talent.

Ms. Jacobson rolled her eyes and said: “Oh, brother. You don’t ever hear about a man being asked, ‘How did you get that job?’”

“I was so pissed,” Ms. Hodson said. “I told him we have to work four times as hard.”

The conversation moved on to the movie, a tale of two sisters, one the leader of a fierce warrior tribe driving the action.

“I don’t want to make it silly,” Ms. Hodson said.

“No,” Ms. Jacobson replied. “These women are badass.”

State of the Art

Ms. Jacobson knows how hard it is for women in Hollywood, on both sides of the camera.

“I’ve been fired from almost every job I’ve ever had,” she said.

But not long after she lost the big executive position at Disney, she was playing a key role in the development of the most lucrative franchise of the current decade, the “Hunger Games” series, which, in addition to making bank, has provided filmgoers with the most visible symbol of female empowerment since Thelma and Louise hit the road 25 years ago. And unlike her cinematic predecessors, it should be noted, Katniss does not meet a tragic end.

In producing such fare, Ms. Jacobson is an industry outlier. A recent University of Southern California study showed that women remain underrepresented among the industry’s directors, writers and composers. The same goes for actors, where men dominate women in speaking roles by a ratio of two to one. Minority and gay characters lag further behind. And the sexualization of female characters is on the rise, the report said.

Ms. Jacobson, who is Jewish and gay, was raised in Brentwood and studied semiotics at Brown University. One of her first jobs after college was working for Joel Silver, the producer of the “Lethal Weapon” and “Matrix” action films. In those days, Ms. Jacobson wore Dr. Martens as she read scripts and suggested ideas. Now, she mostly wears black.

She went on to work as a production executive at DreamWorks SKG and Universal Pictures. Once, she said, a male mentor told her, “You can’t be a kick-ass mother and a kick-ass executive.”

In 1995, she and the producer Bruce Cohen, who would win an Oscar for “American Beauty” and receive a nomination for “Silver Linings Playbook,” started Out There, a grass-roots group comprising gay men and lesbians in entertainment.

By that time, Ms. Jacobson was in a relationship with Jen Bleakley, now her wife with whom she has three children. During an Out There meeting held at Mr. Cohen’s house in the mid-’90s, Ms. Jacobson met Ryan Murphy, the producer and writer known for the television shows “Glee” and “American Horror Story.”

“It’s hard to forget how radical it was in that age for a gay woman to not be afraid,” Mr. Murphy said.

That night, he recalled, the group talked about how to add same-sex couples into scripts and fight discrimination in the workplace.

“It was almost like a gay kindergarten, where you learned the tools,” Mr. Murphy said.

War Stories

Cut to a garden table at Tiato, a restaurant in Santa Monica on a sun-drenched afternoon, where Ms. Jacobson was meeting with two friends: Zanne Devine, a Miramax executive she has known for nearly 30 years, and Audrey Wells, the writer-director of the 2003 romance “Under The Tuscan Sun,” which Ms. Jacobson greenlit in her executive days at Disney.

The lunch-table talk turned to how Hollywood has shown signs of change since then.

“You assumed that movies about women should be made, and women should make them,” Ms. Wells told Ms. Jacobson.

“Those movies work,” Ms. Jacobson replied.

“But you didn’t act like you were making a sacrifice or saying yes on a whim,” Ms. Wells said. For instance, she said, when she ran into trouble with an unruly Italian crew during the filming of “Under the Tuscan Sun,” Ms. Jacobson came through with support.

“She believed me instead of saying, ‘What’s wrong with you?’” Ms. Wells said, adding that Ms. Jacobson gave her two extra weeks of filming.

“Those were the days,” Ms. Jacobson said with a sigh.

As the three tucked into salads and glasses of iced tea, Ms. Jacobson told the story of how, exactly, she was fired in 2006. On a Sunday in July, Ms. Jacobson got a heads-up call from a reporter who had heard layoffs were in the offing at Disney. Ms. Jacobson called the studio’s chairman, Dick Cook, only to hear nothing back. The next morning, she was in the delivery room at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, where her wife was in labor with their third child. To complicate matters, her father had been admitted to the intensive care unit, too. Then, Ms. Jacobson said, her boss finally returned the call. He fired her over the phone.

“I was furious, so mad, about how they went about it,” said Ms. Devine, the Miramax executive.

Ms. Wells added: “She had just done ‘Pirates of the Caribbean,’ and it made no sense. The way I felt about it was: Today your vengeance begins. And, boy, did she prove that to be the case.”

“I was terrified,” Ms. Jacobson said.

Disney tried to make it up to her by offering her a production deal. But Ms. Jacobson turned it down flat.

“I was like, I don’t want to work for the people who just fired me,” she said.

Her most recent hit was with the Emmy-winning FX series “The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” an exploration of celebrity and race, which was hailed for, among other virtues, Sarah Paulson’s complex portrayal of the prosecutor Marcia Clark. For the second season of “American Crime Story,” Ms. Jacobson promises another deep study of American life, this time focused on Hurricane Katrina.

For the project, Ms. Jacobson sought writers of different socioeconomic backgrounds who understood Southern culture. “It was actually the most awkward thing I’ve had to do, call all these agents and say, ‘Hey, I need your black writers from the South,” said Allison Friedman, an executive at Color Force. The production company received 200 writing samples, which it winnowed down to 20 potential candidates. Of those, the company hired a diverse crew of eight writers.

“There were great writers I’d never heard of,” Ms. Jacobson said. “And that’s a problem.”