from Hacker News

Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, broken down by gender and age

by traviskuhl on 4/9/16, 6:28 PM with 56 comments

• by cperciva on 4/10/16, 8:31 AM

  I love it when people actually provide data rather than merely working based on "gut feelings"! I have a few questions jump out at me as potentially affecting the reliability of the analysis and conclusions, though:

  1. Since the mapping from lines to gender goes through the actor/actress involved, it seems that "trouser roles" (particularly in animated features) may skew the statistics. I don't know if the effect is large enough to matter, though.

  2. The analysis seems to be conducted on the basis of "lines" rather than "words". Does this skew the results? I wouldn't be surprised if predominantly-male "action" scenes had fewer words per line (or, put another way, more lines per word) than other scenes.

  3. The analysis of actor/actress ages aggregates screenplays over all years of publication. This makes it impossible to distinguish between a bias towards young actresses and a bias towards actresses born after a particular date. This is a very important distinction in terms of policy response, since there is little gap between genders up to age 31: If the problem is "older actresses don't get many roles" then it needs a response, but if the problem was "actresses born before 1985 don't get many roles" then the problem will self-correct as the older generations are replaced by more egalitarian ones.

• by facepalm on 4/10/16, 12:15 AM

  Looking at the movies with > 60% male lines, a lot of them seem to be action or war movies. I don't think it is unfair if not 50% of war and action movies have a female heroine, because there are reasons men are more likely to go to war or do dangerous jobs (and no, that reason is not lack of role models in popular entertainment).

  I don't think an analysis like this is very useful at all. What matters is that all demographics get to see the films they like. It doesn't hurt one demographic if another demographic has more films made for.

  Take women's magazines for example - while I haven't counted, it seems there seem to be an awful lot of them. Would it hurt men if there were more women's magazines than men's magazines? I'd argue it wouldn't hurt men at all.

  So if you can show that there is a significant population that doesn't get to see the movies they want, I think you could get a better response.

• by nhebb on 4/10/16, 10:08 AM

  Related Reddit post, with one of the authors answering questions:

  https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/4e15fa/the_largest_...

  Also, from that thread, someone posted that USC does an annual film gender study. The latest is here [pdf]:

  http://annenberg.usc.edu/sitecore/shell/Applications/Content...

• by cm2187 on 4/10/16, 8:58 AM

  A disproportionate amount of movies are about crime stories. Most policemen and criminals are young and men (today, and even more in the past). For the same reason most war movies will also be dominated by young men. Same thing for western movies, the role of women at the XIX wasn't to hold the gun, and guns is what keeps the audience entertained. Why would it be surprising to have a disproportionate amount of young males on screen given the sort of stuff the audience watches?

  For the same reason I would expect to see a disproportionate amount of policemen, soldiers and criminals.

  They should do that by genre. I would be surprised if comedies, romance, or drama would be much imbalanced.

• by facepalm on 4/10/16, 12:09 AM

  Why did they google 8000 screenplays and matched their lines, then used only 2000 for the analysis?

• by ps4fanboy on 4/9/16, 10:21 PM

  What I would much prefer to see is what effect the % of dialog has on profitability. Audiences buying behavior is what is responsible for what kinds of movies, actors and characters are made because movies are profit driven endeavor.

  Looking at their data, I took the "top 20" male and female movies and compared their world wide gross, male movies averaged 50% more than female.

  http://i.imgur.com/24dUzBD.png

• by Animats on 4/10/16, 7:52 AM

  Is the layout of that page just broken, with text on top of text, or is it at my end?

• by WalterBright on 4/10/16, 8:52 AM

  What about the old trope that the hero uses a Mac and the bad guys use Windows? :-)

• by Syrup-tan on 4/9/16, 9:22 PM

  How to mislead with bar graphs; the tutorial

  https://denpa.moe/~indy/e75d18.png

• by maxlambert on 4/9/16, 10:09 PM

  Well, that's not very surprising. People write what they know, and most of the screenplays are written by 30+ male writers.

  If 20-30 year old women would write more great scripts the situation would be different.

  I don't think that screenwriters owe us any social justice. All they need to do is to write the best story they can, and it's much easier to do if you can more easily relate to the main characters.