We are all aware by now of the gender imbalance that exists in the film industry.
It is common knowledge that female actors, filmmakers, producers etc., face far more difficulty in the industry compared to their male counterparts. This applies even more so to women of colour, LGBTQ women and women of lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
The New York Times ran an extensive feature last year, called The Women Of Hollywood Speak Out where actors, filmmakers and other professionals detailed the sexist behaviour they witnessed.
It’s nothing new.
However, this study by Polygraph , examining dialogue from 2,000 films shows just how deep the problem lies.
Just look at the below graph, that shows the ratio of lines spoken in these films by men in comparison to those said by women.
The researchers noted : “Dialogue available to women who are over 40 years old decrease[s] substantially.”
“For men, it’s the exact opposite: there are more roles available to older actors.”
“In 22% of our films, actresses had the most amount of dialogue (i.e., they were the lead). Women are more likely to be in the second place for most amount of dialogue, which occurs in 34% of films. The most abysmal stat is when women occupy at least 2 of the top 3 roles in a film, which occurs in 18% of our films.”
Only 18% of the TWO THOUSAND FILMS examined had more than one woman in a leading role, and even then only 22% of films surveyed had a woman speaking the majority of the lines.
You can read the entire study here.
