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.
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.
The idea that you trust your judgement on the magazine ratio is probably one of the reasons that this analysis is useful. Are you sure that you aren't just biased against noticing men's magazines? Or perhaps there are a lot of magazines with language specifically gendering the reader as male that you consider neutral...
I am sure there are certain media that cater primarily to women. For example, at least in my country, there is a whole genre of romantic novels about physicians.
The main point is that it is not a problem if some product category caters primarily to a specific demographic. What would be an issue would be a significant part of the population being neglected. However, there is no reason why that shouldn't be fixable by the market alone.
I can think of several TV series that cater specifically to women, with lots of women talking.
How can we be sure that the 2000 movies the article talks about randomly selected movies, not movies cherry picked to show the desired result?
Even if we pick random scripts that are available online, there might be an inherent bias? For example, maybe older scripts (from the 50ies) are more likely to be online?
I encourage you to do some quantifiable analysis that you judge to be free from bias and see if you get a different result.
You seem to be immediately dismissing this analysis as not useful, while only providing anecdotal evidence and questions. Do you feel like your points are more/less useful than the quantified analysis in the article?
In what way do you think my comment is biased (given that I explicitly marked the women's magazine as a guess and an example)? In what way do you think the analysis is useful?
I think an analysis like that can be amusing. I am not convinced that it is useful, as I explained in my previous comments.
As for doing the research myself, I may, but it is expensive. I don't have a gender studies grant or anything to pay for it.
I think you're biased because you're dismissing this article without any evidence. I encourage you to post some research about the topic. As for the gender studies grant comment, do you have any evidence to suggest that the authors had such a grant?
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.
Author here: we scraped every script website on the Internet. First we tried to normalize the dataset but only doing stats on the top 1,000 box office, but we were missing too many scripts. So we decided to go big and then display a cut of the data that's only films in the top 2,500 box office (we had about half of those).
We're aware of sampling error and the potential for cherry-picking, but also struggled to figure out what was a representative sample.
How do scripts end up on such script websites? Is it a fair assumption that it is random if a movie's script is online or not?
If you go by box office success it seems to me you already introduce the bias of consumer preferences, not choices of the movie industry. Wouldn't it be better to go by production costs (and marketing budget, if that is not included in production costs)? Although over time one would hope the industry choices would reflect consumer preferences.
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.
How would this show the effect of male/female dialog on profitability? All it shows is that the most profitable films feature heavy male dialog, not that audiences select for more male dialog when seeing a film. And what is your thesis here anyways? That the film industry features men more heavily because society is misogynistic (just not the film industry itself)?
It would just show the bias of the consumer, which would explain the bias in the product? Action movies for example are incredibly male dominated and also very popular, until the general public is OK with seeing women getting beaten, killed and abused I dont see this ever changing.
The majority of the films in this list that have predominately female characters all fit into a specific mold of story telling with very little overlap with the types of movies that feature predominately male characters. I very much doubt that either group who consumes these types of movies is interested in the same sort of stories about the opposite sex. That of course is my opinion.
I dont see how any of that is misogynistic? That would be like saying teenage girls are misogynistic for favoring boy bands over girl bands.
"Action movies for example are incredibly male dominated and also very popular, until the general public is OK with seeing women getting beaten, killed and abused I don't see this ever changing."
Angelina Jolie has made several action movies where she gets banged up quite a bit. (Salt was originally designed for Tom Cruise; Jolie was a big improvement.) So has Scarlett Johansson (who, as Black Widow, ought to have an origin movie but isn't getting one.) Sigourney Weaver also had some tough times in her action movies. All of those were successful films.
This is an almost tautological position though. Films have a gender bias because society has a gender bias because, among other things, films have a gender bias. The reality is human beings have agency to make new things, dismantle previous stereotypes, and create an equal footing. Female action stars are not a concept that puts us at an impasse for creating gender equality (in fact, I'd argue with things like the Hunger Games, some of the marvel films, etc. the trend is to begin featuring women incrementally more in action films). I still haven't seen any evidence that gender stereotypes or prevalence of women are a causal factor in profitability, but even if that were the case I think we need to ask ourselves if that's a just position to take for defensibility.
Watching Game of Thrones recently, Brienne of Tarth gets really beaten up in the fight with the Hound. I do not recall having seen that level of prolonged physical action/violence on a woman in anything else before. Felt quite shocking to watch, even given the show's reputation.
I am currently working on a post (completely coincidental to the existence of the submission) attempting to determine the difference in domestic box office revenue from movies with male leads and movies with female leads.
It would be nice to see some control as well, like filtering out movies that do not make back their budgets (within reason), as they are probably just terrible movies regardless of diversity characteristics.
I added filters for minimum 10M domestic revenue and released 2000 or later for various data fidelity reasons. (I do not have access to budget information so cannot account for that) Sample Size is still 2,012 which is good enough.
Spoilers: yes, movies which star male actors (fitting this criteria) earn significantly more than female leads on average, and it is statistically significant.
Additionally, there is no difference (practical and statistical) between RT/Metacritic scores of movies with male leads/female leads.
The bar graphs were not designed to compare total amount of lines for each gender/age-range combination. Rather, they're meant to indicate how the percentage of lines for each gender is skewed older for male actors vs younger for female actors.
If they were to determine the length of each bar using amount of lines instead of percentage of lines, all that would be immediately clear is that females have less lines, a fact well established in the rest of the article, and the point would be lost.
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.
When I started taking film classes at UCLA, I was quickly informed I had what it took to go all the way in film. I was a damn good writer, but more importantly (yeah, you didn’t think good writing was a main prerequisite in this industry, did you?) I understood the process of rewriting to cope with budget (and other) limitations. I didn’t hesitate to rip out my most beloved scenes when necessary. I also did a lot of research and taught myself how to write well-paced action/adventure films that would be remarkably cheap to film – that was pure gold.
There was just one little problem.
I had to understand that the audience only wanted white, straight, male leads. I was assured that as long as I made the white, straight men in my scripts prominent, I could still offer groundbreaking characters of other descriptions (fascinating, significant women, men of color, etc.) – as long as they didn’t distract the audience from the white men they really paid their money to see.
I was stunned. I’d just moved from a state that still held Ku Klux Klan rallies only to find an even more insidious form of bigotry in California – running an industry that shaped our entire culture. But they kept telling me lots of filmmakers wanted to see the same changes I did, and if I did what it took to get into the industry and accrue some power, then I could start pushing the envelope and maybe, just maybe, change would finally happen. So I gave their advice a shot.
Only to learn there was still something wrong with my writing, something unanticipated by my professors. My scripts had multiple women with names. Talking to each other. About something other than men. That, they explained nervously, was not okay. I asked why. Well, it would be more accurate to say I politely demanded a thorough, logical explanation that made sense for a change (I’d found the “audience won’t watch women!” argument pretty questionable, with its ever-shifting reasons and parameters)
At first I got several tentative murmurings about how it distracted from the flow or point of the story. I went through this with more than one professor, more than one industry professional. Finally, I got one blessedly telling explanation from an industry pro: “The audience doesn’t want to listen to a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about.”
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George R.R. Martin on writing women:
George Stroumboulopoulos: There's one thing that's interesting about your books. I noticed that you write women really well and really different.... Where does that come from?
George R.R. Martin: You know, I've always considered women to be people.
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.