Measuring Female Representation and Impact in Films over Time Luoying Yang 1, Zhou Xu 2, Jiebo Luo3 University of Rochester luoying [email protected] 1, [email protected] 2, [email protected] 3 Abstract the big screen is detrimental for young girls. They are dis- couraged from pursuing ambitions and participating actively Women have always been underrepresented in movies in social affairs (Haraldsson and Wangnerud¨ 2019). There- and not until recently has the representation of women in movies improved. To investigate the improvement fore, female under-representation is a critical issue that must of female representation and its relationship with a be addressed. movie’s success, we propose a new measure, the fe- In more recent times, women have made inroads into var- male cast ratio, and compare it to the commonly used ious fields and films have started to respond to female view- Bechdel test result. We employ generalized linear re- ers with strong and well-rounded female characters (Mur- gression with L1 penalty and a Random Forest model phy 2015; Heldman, Frankel, and Holmes ). There are many to identify the predictors that influence female repre- studies and projects devoted to studying evolving feminism sentation, and evaluate the relationship between female in films, centering on both the upstream effects, in which representation and a movie’s success in three aspects: content is structured through the actions of major filmmak- revenue/budget ratio, rating, and popularity. Three im- ers in gendered organizations who presume the public’s pref- portant findings in our study have highlighted the diffi- culties women in the film industry face both upstream erences, as well as the downstream effects, where audiences and downstream. First, female filmmakers, especially respond to content and attitudes are formed and reinforced. female screenplay writers, are instrumental for movies In our work of examining gender representation in films, we to have better female representation, but the percent- ask the following two questions: What factors in the film- age of female filmmakers has been very low. Second, making process have a significant impact on female repre- movies that have the potential to tell insightful stories sentation in films, and do films that feature more female rep- about women are often provided with lower budgets, resentation outperform those that do not commercially? and this usually causes the films to in turn receive more To answer these questions, we need to define a proper criticism. Finally, the demand for better female rep- measure for female representation in films. The Bechdel test resentation from moviegoers has also not been strong is a popular measure for examining how well-rounded and enough to compel the film industry to change, as movies that have poor female representation can still be very complete the representations of women in media are. The popular and successful in the box office. test asks only three questions: • Are there at least two women in the film who have names? Introduction • Do those women talk to each other? Film is a common entertainment form that fulfills the au- • Do they talk to each other about something other than a dience’s desire to make emotional connections with char- man? acters and learn about their social world. However, it was arXiv:2001.03513v3 [cs.CY] 31 Oct 2020 The test is simple and has been widely used in many film very rare for women to see inspiring counterparts on the big gender studies to measure female representation(Lindner screen in the past. Many key roles in film-making, such as di- and Schulting ; Lindner, Lindquist, and Arnold 2015). How- rectors and cinematographers, were for many decades dom- ever, one major criticism of the test is that it fails to re- inated almost entirely by men (Lauzen 2012), and women veal the hidden gender imbalance structure(Micic 2015). A did not have enough power to make demands in the film in- movie can pass the Bechdel test yet still portray women as dustry. Consequently, women have been constantly under- auxiliary characters with minimal screen time. For example, represented in movies. Even when they are present, women both Wonder Woman and The Martian passed the test even are often portrayed in circumscribed and subordinated ways though the importance of female characters is very different in traditionally feminine (i.e., stereotyped) roles, such as between the two movies. Therefore, we propose a new mea- nonprofessionals, homemakers, wives or parents, and sex- sure of female representation in films: the percentage of fe- ual gatekeepers (Collins 2011). Lacking a role model on male cast members in the whole cast. This proposal is based Copyright © 2020, Association for the Advancement of Artificial on the intuition that if more women are cast for a film, then Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. women will have more representation on the big screen. In addition to a new measure of female representation, we tion budgets and consequently earn less money. However, would also like to consider different aspects of movie suc- given the same budget, female representation does not boost cess. Box office return is a popular measure of movie success the box office return (Lindner, Lindquist, and Arnold 2015). because it is directly linked to profit. However, movie ratings They have conducted a similar analysis for movie critics us- and popularity are also important measures of a movie’s suc- ing the same set of movies and obtained a similar conclusion cess. Public acclamation and popularity brings confidence to that female representation has little effect on critics (Lindner the studios and producers to inspire similar films or sequels and Schulting ). The analysis in these papers is the closest even when the box office return is not substantially high. to ours. However, this study only drew samples of 974 films Our analyses are completed in two steps. Drawing on a from the 2000-2009 decade and considered only a few con- sample of the most widely distributed films, we first com- founding variables such as the budget and genres. Our anal- bine a content analysis using the Bechdel Test with film- ysis include a larger sample from a longer time span with making data such as the budget and gender of crews to ex- a larger set of confounding variables to provide deeper in- amine what factors are influential on encouraging more fe- sights over time. male representation during the film-making process. Next, including all film characteristics such as female represen- Data tation, budget, genre, and many others, we further examine Three data sources are used in this project: the Bechdel whether better female representation can increase the chance Test Movie List 2, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) 3, of success for films while adjusting for other possible con- and the Movie Database (TMDb) 4. The Bechdel Test Movie founding variables. In doing so, we contribute to sociologi- List contains over 8000 movies crowd-sourced through the cal theories about the reciprocal impact of feminism. Internet with a flag showing if each of them passes the The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In sec- Bechdel Test or not. IMDb has an up-to-date movie dataset, tion 2, we review the background literature that studies the which is widely used among many movie related projects. gender gap in films and analyzes box office performance. In However, since IMDb does not provide an official API, we section 3, we describe the data features and the data collec- have limited access to some data, such as the full list of the tion process. In section 4, we present the methods and mod- cast and crew members of each movie. TMDb on the other els used throughout this study. We present our experiments hand is a crowd-sourced online movie database similar to and the corresponding results in Section 4. In section 5, we IMDb. It is used less often, but with the advantage of having present and discuss our conclusions and future directions. an API, we can easily access a variety of movie-related data of interest to us. Related work Most of the studies that center on gender inequality in me- Data Acquisition dia are content analysis (Murphy 2015; Heldman, Frankel, The Bechdel Test Movie List is downloaded using its API. and Holmes ; Micic 2015), which means they study how It contains 8190 movies at the time, with 7 fields. The rele- women are portrayed in media. While content analysis is be- vant features include imdbid (can be used to join with other yond the scope of our study, the related works have shown datasets), title, year, and rating (0 means no two women, 1 that the roles of women are evolving on the big screen. There means no talking, 2 means talking about a man, 3 means it are also many studies about female underrepresentation, al- passes the test). beit on a small scale and with simple analysis. Thomas has The IMDb dataset is downloaded from its website, where shown that in the top 10 worldwide highest grossing films of only the title.basic table is used. It contains 9 fields, includ- 2016, women speak only 27% of the lines (Thomas 2017). ing tconst (imdbid), titleType, primaryTitle, originalTitle, The finding is novel but the sample size is too small. A isAdult, startYear, endYear, runtimeMinutes, and genres. team at the Rhodes Information Initiative at Duke Univer- Getting the TMDb dataset requires more work with its sity published a report that movies which pass the Bechdel API. The first step is to obtain the tmdbids that are associated Test have a statistically significant higher return on invest- with the imdbids within the Bechdel Movie List.