Film dialogue often reinforces stereotypes about race and gender, a machine learning study confirms

There’s a way to help fix the problem: put more women in writer’s rooms

Posted on August 4, 2017

The Verge,  Andrew Liptak

In news that should be no surprise to anyone who follows the film industry, a new study has found that men speak more than twice as much as women in film, and often, the dialogue that is given to women helps reinforce gender and racial stereotypes.

The new study comes from the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering. Researchers examined more than 53,000 dialogue segments from 7,000 characters in 1,000 scripts, and used machine learning to study how characters spoke and interacted along racial, gender, and age lines. They also examined the makeup of the crews that produced the films, including the writers, directors, and casting agents. Full article on The Verge