The whole country is a strip club, according to Jennifer Lopezs swindling erotic dancer character Ramona in Hustlers.

On the surface, writer/director Lorene Scafarias new film, in theaters Friday, looks like a straight mans fever dream. There are scantily clad, enviably flexible women slithering down nightclub poles and grinding on the laps of handsy Wall Streeters showering them with dollar bills. But if you look beyond its tits-and-ass veneer, youll find the nut of Ramonas schlocky one-liner: Women use whatever theyve got be it their bodies or Machiavellian ways to survive male-constructed capitalism.

Hustlers, like everything, is about transactions, the two most important being sex and cash. Women in film have historically had passive relationships with sex and money (see The Godfather or Gone With the Wind). But in recent movies, including Hustlers, The Hustle and The Kitchen, women have become more active players in the dialogue about who gets to achieve wealth. In doing so, theyve confronted the insidious gender gap.

Inspired by actual events reported in Jessica Presslers 2015 New York magazine article , Hustlers is a sensationalized version of a story about shrewd strippers played by Lopez, Constance Wu, Lili Reinhart and Keke Palmer who seduce then drug rich white men and swipe their million-dollar credit cards. The film highlights the insurmountable challenges women face in their paths to wealth as opposed to their male counterparts.

Thats particularly true for single moms like Destiny (Wu), who have to consider astronomical day care expenses as well as other household bills. Following the Wall Street collapse in 2008 that left the nightclub business almost barren, she tries to find a job at a Bloomingdales-type store but is rejected by an employer citing her lack of retail experience. Ramona, whos also a mother, is able to find a job at a clothing store but is not making enough money to support her daughter and sustain the lavish lifestyle a penthouse apartment, fur coats and designer heels formerly supplied by her sugar daddies.

It becomes a question of how long do these single women put up with having to live paycheck to paycheck, while their grubby male clients, who continued to populate the club though in smaller numbers, parade their fat wallets around them before they start bucking the system. Of course, we all understand that what theyre doing is illegal, but the frustrating realization that wealth is always just out of reach for women is overwhelming.

The structure is not set up for women to succeed, Anjali Pradhan, an investment coach and founder of Dahlia Wealth , told HuffPost. For instance, women are prevented from getting promoted. If theyre entrepreneurs, very few women get funding for their projects.

On top of that, the wage gap in 2008 meant that the average American woman who was getting paid above the table in a traditional full-time job earned $11,000 less than her male counterparts, according to the Institute for Womens Policy Research . For that same year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported that 13% of women lived below the poverty line as opposed to 9.6% men. Those numbers dont even compare to the millions and, in some cases, billions of dollars that Wall Street men were earning before the crash.

The advantage of time has not helped change the dismal gender wage gap, either. The Institute for Womens Policy Research reported that in 2018 women were still earning just 81% of their male counterparts salaries.

So there was little hope for workers like the women in Hustlers to ever see the kind of wealth their male clients possessed because their money is often undeclared, which prohibits them from investing in real estate or the stock market, Pradhan says. Those avenues are how a lot of people get very wealthy. So its easy to see how the demoralizing glass ceiling can lead some women, like Destiny and Ramonas crew, to follow a scheming path just for a taste of temporary wealth.

The same is true in the contemporary comedy The Hustle, which follows Penny, a jaded millennial (Rebel Wilson), who for all intents and purposes is a capable and smart woman. But like the ladies of Hustlers, she also knows her skills are undervalued compared with those of the successful yet foolish men she chooses to pilfer. And the men are too focused on their egos and hard-ons to notice either way.

Its easy to call Hustlers and The Hustle simple revenge films in which female characters throw a middle finger up at the patriarchal economic system. But both movies are grounded by how they highlight womens relationship with wealth. Theyre less intoxicated by the idea of flaunting their cash than they are by being able to live gratifying lives whether thats with closets lined with chinchilla shawls, helping out their girlfriends in times of need or giving their kids the best care.

A lot of men want to make money for the sake of making money, Pradhan said. But for women, becoming wealthy is a lot more about opportunity. Its about living the life they want and helping other people. Its a conduit to other things that they feel are impactful.

This image of abundance is a far cry from how women regarded wealth back in the 1970s, the setting of The Kitchen. Tiffany Haddish, Elisabeth Moss and Melissa McCarthy star as New York City mob wives who turn to crime when their husbands are carted off to jail, leaving them to fend for themselves financially. Because this was an era when more women stayed at home while the men worked, these protagonists are left virtually penniless with little to no job experience. For them, wealth was about being able to feed themselves and their families.

Women who were homemakers, many without secondary education at the time, trying to enter the workforce, werent going to be able to make as much as the former male breadwinner, said Shahen Derderian, CEO and founder of Shahen Derderian & Associates , a business management and wealth advisory firm. They would have to make drastic adjustments to compensate for the lack of income. Theyd be in a desperate situation and thinking of the easiest solution to get food on the table.

That dire situation, Derderian explained, is a result of a severe lack of job opportunities for women, save for entry-level secretarial or office manager positions, which may barely pay their mortgages much less Kathys (McCarthy) child care. When Kathy flippantly asks Claire (Moss), What job are you going to get? shes understandably met with silence. For women of color like Ruby (Haddish), the options were even worse, as they had to compete for whatever jobs white women were favored to get.

While the gender and racial biases were more explicit back in the 70s, the women of The Kitchen face similar challenges as their modern peers in Hustlers and The Hustle. That they unapologetically center themselves in flagrant moneymaking situations is still radical. It gives them a voice they didnt always have, which is particularly important today as more women fight to expose wage inequalities.

Vast social conditioning has taught women that its not polite to even talk about money, Pradhan said. Whereas men, within a couple of hours, everyone knows how much they make. Men are not interested in following the rules to that degree, and neither should we.