The data visualization website Polygraph has unveiled a deep dive into the gender biases of more than 2,000 movies with what the site claims is “arguably the largest undertaking of script analysis, ever.” To complete its study, Polygraph cross-indexed character names with actor data from IMDB, including gender and age. The resulting collection of interactive infographics the site compiled from its findings adds statistical research to what you might think of as common wisdom: Men have more speaking roles in Hollywood than women do.
Men do most of the talking in movies — even when they’re about women
A huge new survey of dialogue in film reveals movies like Frozen, The Hunger Games, and Pretty Woman all have more dialogue for men than for women. And that’s just the beginning.
Aja Romano wrote about pop culture, media, and ethics. Before joining Vox in 2016, they were a staff reporter at the Daily Dot. A 2019 fellow of the National Critics Institute, they’re considered an authority on fandom, the internet, and the culture wars.
What this looks like in actual practice is kind of staggering. For instance, of the 2,005 screenplays Polygraph surveyed, the dialogue in only two of them is 100 percent delivered by women — the '90s dramedy Now and Then and the female-driven horror film The Descent 1.
Note: The researchers looked at screenplays, which can differ from the final version that makes it to the screen. Per Polygraph: "For 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). But there are definitely problems with this approach: films change quite a bit from script to screen. Directors cut lines. They cut characters. They add characters. They change character names. They cast a different gender for a character. We believe the results are still directionally accurate, but individual films will definitely have errors."
Meanwhile the list of films with all-male casts and/or 100 percent male-only dialogue is incredibly long:
This Polygraph infographic shows that the majority of dialogue in the films surveyed is delivered by men.
One of Polygraph’s more surprising findings arose when the site filtered its survey to specifically concentrate on Disney films. Disney was an obvious choice because of the stature the company holds with the public and its long tradition of “princess” films. But as the resulting breakdown reveals, 22 of 30 Disney films analyzed had more male than female dialogue — even when they were ostensibly centered on a female character.
In films like The Little Mermaid and Tangled, this was often because even though women were central to the plot, there were more supporting male characters involved in driving the action. But the dialogue breakdown still skews male even for films that have notably been lauded for having strong female characters in lead roles.
By way of example, consider The Hunger Games. Even though Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss has the vast majority of individual dialogue, the majority of the dialogue in the film as a whole belongs to male supporting characters:
The Hunger Games skews towards more male dialogue due to a male-heavy second act.
Many of your favorite romantic comedies also skew male because of that same scenario.
Here are a few more key findings from Polygraph’s research:
- In 78 percent of the films analyzed, the lead character was male.
- The site also viewed its data in the context of the much-criticized Hollywood age gap, finding that men over age 42 had 44 percent of the dialogue apportioned to male characters across all films surveyed.
- Meanwhile, only 23 percent of women over age 42 had equivalent dialogue out of that apportioned to female characters across all films surveyed.
In presenting their findings, Polygraph reporters Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels said they decided to compile the report based on responses to a previous Polygraph analysis of whether popular films passed or failed the Bechdel test. The Bechdel test, which asks whether films contain dialogue between two or more women that isn’t about a man, provides a broad survey of sexism in Hollywood — but it’s often criticized as a useless metric when it comes to analyzing individual films for content, a consideration that led many readers to dismiss Polygraph’s previous study.
Polygraph’s goal in this latest analysis was to provide additional objective statistical data concerning the overall disproportion of gender in film. Vox did catch one error (Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang has been removed from the database after Daniels double-checked and confirmed that a supporting female character’s lines were missing from the analysis), but overall the report bears out the researchers’ explanation of their methodology as “directionally accurate.”
You can search for individual films in Polygraph’s database as well as compare film genres. Filtering for films with equal gender parity yields a broad mix of movies that span many different genres and whose critical reception varies widely, from the universally panned Terminator: Salvation to the cultural icon Silence of the Lambs. Hollywood may be talking more about the gender gap, but there’s a long way to go before “equal” translates to “quality moviemaking.”
