Using data science to understand the film industry\u2019s gender gap

Dima Kagan,Michael Fire,Thomas Chesney

doi:10.1057/s41599-020-0436-1

Dima Kagan, Michael Fire + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0436-1

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Abstract

Data science can offer answers to a wide range of social science questions. Here we turn attention to the portrayal of women in movies, an industry that has a significant influence on society, impacting such aspects of life as self-esteem and career choice. To this end, we fused data from the online movie database IMDb with a dataset of movie dialogue subtitles to create the largest available corpus of movie social networks (15,540 networks). Analyzing this data, we investigated gender bias in on-screen female characters over the past century. We find a trend of improvement in all aspects of women‘s roles in movies, including a constant rise in the centrality of female characters. There has also been an increase in the number of movies that pass the well-known Bechdel test, a popular—albeit flawed—measure of women in fiction. Here we propose a new and better alternative to this test for evaluating female roles in movies. Our study introduces fresh data, an open-code framework, and novel techniques that present new opportunities in the research and analysis of movies.

Highlights

The film industry is one of the strongest branches of the media, reaching billions of viewers worldwide (MPAA, 2018; UNIC, 2017)
We achieved this goal by utilizing movie subtitles3 and a list of movie character names
We found that only 12% of all movies passed our Gender Ratio test, revealing how dominant gender disparities continue to be in the film industry

Summary

Introduction

The film industry is one of the strongest branches of the media, reaching billions of viewers worldwide (MPAA, 2018; UNIC, 2017). It is well known that movie directors are primarily white and male (Smith et al, 2017). With such a gender bias, it is not surprising that there is a male gender dominance in movies (Smith and Choueiti, 2010; Ramakrishna et al, 2017). Studies from the past two decades have confirmed that women in the film industry are both underrepresented (University, 2017; Lauzen, 2018b) and portrayed stereotypically (Wood, 1994). A recent study found that the underrepresentation is so sizeable that there are twice as many male speaking characters as female in the average movie (Lauzen, 2018a)

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