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Posted on August 2, 2017
Press Trust of India
Los Angeles, Aug 1 (PTI) Female roles are not central to the plot in Hollywood movies, say scientists including those of Indian origin who found that stereotypes of women, race and ageing are reinforced in films.
The study, which also uncovers how media communicates about race and age, was able to quantify the sophistication and the tone of language of 7,000 characters and over 53,000 dialogues in nearly 1,000 film scripts.
Researchers from University of Southern California in the US analysed content of characters’ language and their interactions across gender, race and age.
They looked at cast, genre, the production teams across films including writers, directors and casting agents.
“Writers consciously or subconsciously agree to established norms about gender that are built into their word choices,” said Anil Ramakrishna, first author of the study published in the journal Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
“In an ideal world, gender is in an auxiliary fact, it has nothing to do with the way actors are presented and what they say,” said Ramakrishna.
Of the scripts and dialogues reviewed, men had over 37,000 dialogues; women had just over 15,000. Women portrayed just over 2,000 characters, while men portrayed almost 4,900. Full article on The Trust of India
