In recent years I have noticed Hollywood movies generally have a token female in most movies, but mostly male characters. When actresses have requested equity in pay, the response has been that the actress in question had fewer lines. The implication is that women are asking for equal pay for less work. I found it funny since most women did not ask for unequal roles. My perspective is that what they acknowledged, giving the characters less significance, and less lines reinforces women’s inequality. We are inculcated with the female role as a supporting role to the main characters.
As a woman who started in the tech, starting in the late 90s, I started my career seeing many female programmers. Historically, women were many of the first programmers. After Hollywood’s trope of the male tech geek, we have come to the point where women are assumed to be less capable as programmers than males. Hollywood has the ability to influence how we see ourselves and others. It has the ability to create bias or to reduce bias. Unfortunately, too often Hollywood reinforces our biases.
I decided to analyze IMDB principal cast data starting from 1980 through 2019, inclusive. I eliminated 2020 and 2021 due to fewer movies being release and most not going to theaters. It would have introduced more variables. I first looked at data for some of the top movies for each year on https://www.boxofficemojo.com/ and merged it with the IMDB data. I also ran on the full IMDB data set in that year range, filtering for English titles. My focus was on the percentage of males/female principals (actors and actresses) listed in each movie. I removed the director records. I looked at the data across each genre to see if there were differences in gender representation. I calculated the percentage of movies each year that have > 60% male cast members, > 60% females and between 40 and 60% of males and females (balanced). I also calculated a 5-year average for these calculations as well.
My goal was to see if there has been improvement in the representation of women in movies from 1980 to current times. I think that the gender balance of the principals is an indicator of who is being paid the most money and who is getting the speaking roles. Whose stories are we telling? Are we still primarily focused on men’s stories? Are women included in the conversations? Seeing women mostly in supporting roles and rarely in leading roles, influences how we see ourselves, as women and how society sees women.
genre bin pct_mostly_male
Animation early 80s 60.000000
Animation late 10s 72.093023
Romance early 80s 55.357143
Romance late 10s 24.390244
Action early 80s 76.595745
Action late 10s 66.406250
Family early 80s 66.666667
Family late 10s 41.666667
Mystery early 80s 72.222222
Mystery late 10s 36.363636
Biography early 80s 71.428571
Biography late 10s 59.183673
See above the details regarding the percentage of movies by genre with 60+% male principal actors, grouped in 5 year increments starting with the early 1980s through 2019.
Genres that have done worse over time from a gender balance perspective: Animated movies.
Animated movies with 60+% male principals increased since the early 1980s from 60% to 72% in the late 2010s.
Notable Improvements: Mystery, Romance, Family
Mystery movies with mostly male principal actors, 60+%, female representation increased, the percentage of movies with 60%+ male principals decreased since early 1980s from 72% to 36% in the late 2010s.
Romantic movies with mostly male principal actors, 60+%, female representation increased since early 1980s. 60%+ male movies decreased from 55% to 24%.
Family movies have seen a drop in male principal actor films from the early 1980s until the late 2010s. The drop was from 67% to 42%.
In the next section I will drill down to look at whether the reduction of predominantly male principal actors results in more balanced gender films or more predominantly female principal cast members.
If you look to the left, animated movie data is binned into 5 year increments: 1980 – 1984, 1985 – 1989, 1990-1994, 1995-1999, 2000-2004, 2005-2009, 2010-2014, 2015-2019.
The lines are indicating the percentage of movies with the specified percentage of male principals. The blue line shows that in the early 80s, approximately 60% of movies had greater than 60% male principals. By the late 2010s, this has gone up to over 70%
The purple line shows that balanced gender animated movies have decreased since the early 80s. In the early 80s, 40% of the animated films had pct of both actors and actresses between 40% and 60%. Now, balanced films are approximately 23%.
The green line shows the mostly female movies, which started at 0% in the early 80s and was at 4.65% in the late 2010s. However, in the early 2010s it was a 0. I couldn’t see this is a true increase.
This finding about gender imbalance in animated movies is particularly concerning in my mind since we are inculcating bias towards males in our youngest children. People often think there will be change as time passes. We’ll better with future generations. However, this statistic tells us that Hollywood is instilling the patriarchy in our children from a very young age and it’s getting worse, not better. The danger will be that by the time they grow up and see more balanced films, the bias against women is firmly ingrained. I wonder if this may cause more resentment in young men toward women when they grow up and start seeing the more gender balanced movies.
Looking to the right to see data for romantic movies, the percent predominantly male principals, gender balanced principals and predominantly female principles.
What I found so interesting was that in the early 1980s, the largest percentage of romantic movies were male dominated in terms of principal cast. In second position was movies with gender balanced principal cast and then predominantly female.
Then in the late 2010s, the order above completely changed where the male dominated cast moved to third position and the female dominated principal cast became the most common, just slightly more common than the gender balanced principal cast. The result is that 39% of romantic movies have predominantly female principals, 36.6% of movies have a gender balanced principal cast and 24.4% of romantic movies have a male dominated principal cast.
Why are we seeing so many more romance movies with more female principals? When I went back and looked at the data, I can see that there are numerous romantic movies where the female lead is the central character. Thus, her friends are included in the story, more than in the past when the story was often about the male. Think Adam Sandler movies.
Mystery movies saw an increase in gender balanced principal cast to the point where more movies are gender balanced than have predominantly male principals. Movies with gender balanced principals increased from 22% to 56.8%. Movies with predominantly male principals decreased from 72.2% to 36.4%.
Predominantly female principal casts are still uncommon, growing only from 5.6% in the early 1980s to 6.8% in late 2010s.
Forty years later action movies still have predominantly male principals. The percentage of male principals has only improved from 76.5% to 66.4%.
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Hi Edward,
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