[tomlock]

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?

[facepalm]

I didn't dismiss it, I question it's usefulness. The article itself doesn't provide any evidence for it's usefulness.

[tomlock]

I'm confused because I think typically a person would consider implying an article or perhaps a piece of code is useless would be an extremely dismissive move. Do you think it is unreasonable for me to imply you are being dismissive when, faced with a quantified piece of research, you suggest it is useless without providing a quantified counterpoint?

[facepalm]

You might enjoy this paper about gendered glacier science: http://phg.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/01/08/030913251562...

I have provided an explanation of why I don't consider it very useful. From the article itself you can gather that there are many movies with more female than male lines. Therefore I question that women are disadvantaged by the available movie offerings.

So what exactly are you talking about? What, in your view, is the usefulness of the article?

[tomlock]

I find it kind of confusing that you seem to be posting articles, claims and references to funding that can’t be found in the article, or don’t seem related to the article.

For instance, you’ve just now made the claim that there are “many” movies with more female than male lines. The article clearly states that in their analysis, they found that 1505 films had 60% or more male lines, while only 173 had 60% or more female lines. That’s a ratio of nearly 10:1. Where are you getting your figures from?

Additionally my initial criticism of you was that you seemed happy to trust your intuition about magazines without any quantifiable evidence. I implied that perhaps without this article, you’d be making a similar claim about the prevalence of movies with women as the predominant speakers in them. This analysis is useful because it can be used to demonstrate that there truly is evidence of a gap between the amount of talking time men and women get in movies.

Perhaps you should examine your behaviour and ask yourself if you’re truly free from bias, when instead of quantifying your objections to a quantified claim, you’ve implied that somehow this is the work of biased academics.

[facepalm]

I find it confusing that you don't even seem to read my comments, and instead claim I said things I didn't. Perhaps instead of accusing me of bias, you should work on your reading skills?

I never made a claim about the authors funding. I also didn't claim that they are biased (although I find it curious that they only use 2000 of the 8000 scripts they found). I DO think they have an agenda, but I wasn't talking about that in this comment thread yet. Nor did I claim that their numbers are wrong.

So if it is important to you that a film you watch has more female than male lines, you have more than 150 to choose from. If you are generous and include movies with an even number of male and female lines, you are up to 490 movies (out of the 2000 they analyzed), or roughly 25% of all movies. Maybe that is plenty enough?

I never doubted their result that there is a "gap" between talking time, averaged across all movies (or at least the movies they looked at). However, why should you care about talking times of movies you don't watch? What matters is the movies you watch. That is all I am saying.

Personally I also think it is stupid to judge a movie by that criterion (likewise for the Bechdel Test), but if it is important to you, why not. But unless you run out of films to watch, there isn't really a problem.

[tomlock]

> 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?

Could you let me know how this doesn’t read as implying the author has bias? Am I perhaps misreading this?

> I don't have a gender studies grant or anything to pay for it.

Am I perhaps misreading that you think research like this is funded by gender studies grants?

Also I’d consider “having an agenda” to be a subset of “being biased”. Perhaps you could state what you see the differences as, and perhaps the evidence you have that suggests the author had an agenda before embarking on this analysis?

From the article as a counterpoint to your claim of an agenda:

“Lately, Hollywood has been taking so much shit for rampant sexism and racism. The prevailing theme: white men dominate movie roles. But it’s all rhetoric and no data, which gets us nowhere in terms of having an informed discussion.”

And here’s a screenshot from the reddit discussion: http://imgur.com/XvaZbFy

You also have provided no quantifiable evidence that there is a bias in favour of women in any area of media, let alone in an area as broad as “movies”. Do you have such evidence?

Also at what point did anyone mention they were afraid of running out of movies to watch?