Female characters get all the worst lines in films, study says – despite making the most money in lead roles

Study finds that men had substantially more lines – 37,000 dialogues – whereas women had just over 15,000

Posted on August 12, 2017

Independent, Fiona Keating

A study into the language of characters in almost 1,000 film scripts has revealed how sexism is embodied by characters on the silver screen.

Using automated tools for linguistic analysis, the research found that women characters tend to be around five years younger than their male partners, according to a Times report.

If female characters are taken out of the plot, it often makes no difference to the story, found a study due to be published in the Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

The research by USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab (SAIL), found that women’s roles were more often focused on issues using “language connecting with family values”. Full article on The Independent