These charts show just how massive the gender divide in films really is
LONDON -- New data based on the analysis of around 2000 film scripts has been published, and guess what? It paints a pretty one-sided picture of the roles men and women play in America's highest grossing films.
The analysis, published by data visualisation website Polygraph, was done by mapping character dialogue to find out the percentage of words spoken by each gender in any given film.
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"The whole project took about 4-6 weeks," Matt Daniels, one half of the Polygraph team, told Mashable.
"First, we found every screenplay repository on the Internet and downloaded about 8,000 scripts. From there, we match those scripts to an IMDB page. We then broke down each script by every character's lines. Finally, we matched each character to an actor."
The resulting charts speak for themselves.
"22 of 30 Disney films have a male majority of dialogue."
The vast majority of Disney films appear to be dominated by male dialogue. Even Frozen, a film with two female leads that falls into the (fairly small) "Gender Balance" category above, still has only 43% of its dialogue spoken by female characters.
"In 22% of our films, actresses had the most amount of dialogue."
The Polygraph analysis also includes a tool which allows you to search for individual films and find out each movie's five characters with the most words, "male/female lines by minute," and overall gender breakdown. Despite Katniss Everdeen coming up on top for number of words spoken in The Hunger Games, for example, the film's overall dialogue breakdown is still 55% male.
"The amount of dialogue, by age-range is completely opposite for women versus men."
Men are already ahead of women in the 22 to 31 age range (28 million v. 21 million words), and they're way ahead of women in the older age groups. In the 42 to 65 age set, men had 55 million words, while women only had 11 million.
So is the balance shifting?
In short, we don't know.
When we asked Daniels if he'd noticed any change in gender trends over time, he said the study didn't have a steady enough sample size -- so he decided not to publish a chart reflecting this specific aspect.
The films sampled can be sorted by decade at the end of the article, though, and the gender bias seems fairly consistent from the 1980s through to the 2010s.
"There's little change by decade," said Daniels.
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