In 22% of our films, actresses had the most amount of dialogue (i.e., they were the lead). How many screenplays have women as lead characters? But the overall dialogue for both films is 52% male, due to the number of male supporting characters. For example, Pretty Woman and 10 Things I Hate About You both have lead women (i.e., characters with the most amount of dialogue). Even romantic comedies have dialogue that is, on average, 58% male.
If a character was cut from the film but is present in the screenplay, we inferred his or her gender based on the script’s pronouns.Īcross thousands of films in our dataset, it was hard to find a subset that didn’t over-index male. If you notice a missing character from the analysis, their lines may be in the remaining 10%. We believe the results are still directionally accurate, but individual films will definitely have errors.Įach screenplay has at least 90% of its lines categorized by gender. They cast a different gender for a character. There are other problems with this approach as well: films change quite a bit from script to screen. Which means a more accurate result would be 99.5% male dialogue instead of our result of 100%. This has unintended consequences: Schindler’s List, for example, has women with lines, just not over this threshold. We did this because minor characters are poorly labeled on IMDB pages. And all of our data is based on screenplays, not a perfect transcription of a film.įor each screenplay, we mapped characters with at least 100 words of dialogue to a person’s IMDB page (which identifies people as an actor or actress). As with Mulan, a plot can center around a character, even though the dialogue doesn’t reflect it. Mushu, her protector dragon, has 50% more words of dialogue than Mulan herself. Even films with female leads, such as Mulan, the dialogue swings male.
The results: 22 of 30 Disney films have a male majority of dialogue. We validated this claim and doubled the sample size to 30 Disney films, including Pixar. In January 2016, researchers reported that men speak more often than women in Disney’s princess films.
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