The Largest Ever Analysis of Film Dialogue by Gender: 2,000 scripts, 25,000 actors, 4 million lines

A really good example of the kind of detailed analysis that provides a more rigorous evidence base for trends, preferences, and biases. Check out the interactive graphics, which are particularly well-designed, informative and effective:

This project was born out of the less-than-stellar response to our analysis of films that fail the Bechdel Test. Commenters were quick to point out that the Bechdel Test is flawed and there are justifiable reasons for films to fail (e.g., they are historic). By measuring dialogue, we have much more objective view of gender in film.

Many of the findings are anecdotally obvious to women in the film industry. But nobody wanted to do the grunt work of gathering the data. We spent weeks just matching scripts to IMDB pages. It’s still not perfect, but we’re now in a much better place than “you know…women are never love-interests when they’re older than 40. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”

All of our sources are available in this Google Doc and as much data as we can share (without getting sued) is available here on Github. Or if you don’t know how to code, here’s an easy way to comb through every film, genre, and year.