Representation of Women in the Film Industry

By: Siew Fen Eow (Project Lead), Ovie Soman, Melina Diaz, Naomi Golin

Intro:

Media, such as music, fashion, and movies, have a significant relationship with society. While pop culture is a reflection of what society values and finds intriguing, the media exposes society to new ideas. Representation of women in the media can bring exposure to a traditionally neglected perspective. In order to explore women’s roles within the film industry, and therefore the women’s representation in society, we decided to analyze Kaggle datasets with movie information, including their Bechdel test rating. In particular, our analysis focused on how the pass-fail rate of movies under the Bechdel test has changed over the decades. We considered multiple factors alongside this, including the rating, budget, and genre of movies. As gender equality becomes an increasingly prominent social issue, it is important to consider how female representation within the media continues to shift over time. While our analysis will outline an improving trend, the continued rise of social movements is a reminder that we are far from achieving gender equality. Consequently, we end our analysis with a focus on current gender-based social movements, and consider their influence within the film industry. As we will outline in this article, while female representation within the film industry has continued to increase over time, as a society, we still have a long way to go to achieve gender equality not only within the film industry, but in all aspects of our lives.

The Data:

We have used two datasets from Kaggle:

1. One contained 6820 movies where 220 movies per year from 1986 to 2016.
2. Another contained 45,000 movies released in or before July 2017

In addition to the Kaggle datasets, we also utilized a dataset that focused specifically on the Bechdel Test and its pass/ fail rate in movies. We combined this with the two Kaggle datasets listed above to perform our analysis.

The Bechdel Test is a simple test that has the following criteria:

1. The movie should have at least two women in it.
2. The women need to talk to each other
3. The women need to talk about something besides a man.

Finally, we also used Twitter datasets from Harvard dataverse and IMDb data published on its official website.

It must be pointed out that the Bechdel test may not always be the most correct indicator of a movie being pro-feminist. There might be movies that show progressive female characters which fail the Bechdel test, as the female characters may belong to distinct narrative arcs and may thus never interact with one another. On the other hand, regressive movies may pass the test by showing two women in tiny roles discussing, for instance, the weather.

Representation of Women with Bechdel test

By Decade:

The barplots below provide a concise view of the Bechdel test passing rate for three decades — namely the 1990s, the 2000s and the 2010s.

The gap in the percentage of movies that pass and fail the Bechdel test is quite significant — 12.76%, to be precise. This indicates some underrepresentation of women in movies and might make sense to readers, as women’s roles in the 1990s were generally a lot less complex and developed than they are right now.

The 2000s saw the percentage of Bechdel-passing movies catching up to that of the Bechdel-failing ones, though the latter remained higher. The gap reduced to 2.62%, amounting to a significant 10.14% decrease from the 1990s. This might have amounted to better female representation in film, with female characters being seen as characters with their own motivations and stories rather than simply as pretty faces.

However, in the 2010s, the gap stretched again, with 10.04% more Bechdel-failing movies than Bechdel-passing movies. This might come as a surprise — one might expect the gap to consistently decrease over the decades, but it increased during the past decade. This could point to a decrease in adequate representation of women in movies. However, the dataset used covers only movies up until 2013, while the 2000s and 1990s are fully covered. This could have resulted in an anomaly, with movies released in the early years of the 2010s having disproportionately lesser representation of women. Besides, as mentioned before, the Bechdel test may not be the most reliable test of how sexist a movie is. Several of the movies that failed the test over these decades might actually be more empowering to women than several of the movies that passed the test.

By Genre:

Following the pass/fail rate of the Bechdel test over the decades, we analyzed how the genre of movies impacted female representation. The first bar graph uses a stacked percentage format to summarize how genres impact whether a movie passes the Bechdel test. From the 1777 movies that were analyzed, horror movies were most likely to pass the Bechdel test between 1970 and 2013. On the other hand, action-based type genres such as Science Fiction, Action, Crime, and Adventure Films were least likely to pass the Bechdel test.

As the second graph indicates, this trend remains relatively consistent throughout the decades, except during the 1970s where the Animation genre held the leading passing rate. In general, this trend does not come as too much of a surprise, as the genres with the lower passing rates, such as Action and Crime, are generally portrayed as being more “masculine” in western media. On the other hand, while having over a 60% passing rate of the Bechdel test among horror films may seem like a success, one thing to consider is how women are truly represented in such films. Traditionally, women are represented in horror films as the victims, or damsels in distress, needing to be saved by men. Consequently, while horror films do have a high passing rate, it is important to consider the reasons behind it in the first place.

The amount of Bechdel-passing movies released increases every decade, but so does the amount of Bechdel-failing movies. In fact, every decade has released more Bechdel-failing movies than Bechdel-passing movies. The 2000s had the smallest percentage difference between the amount of passing and failing movies, and the 1970s had the biggest percentage difference (with 1980s having the next biggest).

For each rating, the amount of Bechdel-failing movies is greater than the amount of Bechdel-passing movies, which isn’t unexpected since out of all movies in the dataset, there are more movies failing the Bechdel test. PG-13 movies had the smallest percentage difference between the groups, while R-rated movies had the biggest percentage difference. Given that a movie is R-rated, it is 12% more likely to be Bechdel-failing than Bechdel-passing.

The film rating system from least to most strict ratings are G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17. The Motion Picture Association defines a PG-13 rating as urging parents to be cautious as some material might be inappropriate for viewers under 13 years old. An R rating, or Restricted rating, contains some adult material and requires viewers under 17 years old to be accompanied by an adult.

The R rating is one tier higher than the PG-13 rating. Notable distinctions between the two are that intense violence is permitted under the PG-13 rating, but realistic, extreme or persistent violence is given a rating of at least R. Additionally, brief nudity or sexually-driven profanity is permitted under the PG-13 rating, but nudity or recurring profanity in a sexual context is given a rating of at least R. This is not only revealing of how society criticizes sexuality harsher than violence, but shows that R-rated movies tolerate sexual scenes while PG-13-rated movies don’t. In the context of the graph above, it is more likely that women don’t have meaningful conversations in R-rated movies than in any other rating. This means that in R-rated movies it is more likely that the women are sexualized and objectified because they are only used in sexual scenes and not given an identity that isn’t centered around a man, which is evident in their lack of conversation about something else.

The 1980s is the only decade where the average budget of Bechdel-passing movies is greater than the average budget of Bechdel-failing movies. the 1970s had the biggest percentage difference. The disparity in budgets may discourage more Bechdel-passing movies to be produced in the future, which is exactly why we need to be advocating for realistic women to be represented in movies.

Do social movements affect the representation of women?

In addition to the Bechdel test, we also wanted to consider how the rise of gender-based social movements over the past decade continues to influence female representation in the film industry. Specifically, we focused on the #MeToo movement.

Using data collected from Twitter, we first considered how the #MeToo trend has grown over the past few years. We want to gauge the presence of the movement in the public consciousness.

In this graph, we can see that “Me too” is mentioned numerous times as compared to the initial year 2018. Thus, we decided to create a catplot where we analyzed how gender bias in the film industry has changed alongside of that.

Our catplot allows us to create a categorical plot with two categorical variables: gender and startYear. We gathered the first name of the people who are most often credited in IMDb and we used a package called gender_guesser.detector which allows us to verify a person’s gender by their first name. startYear represents the corresponding release year of a title for the people who have their gender verified by their first name. In the case of TV series, startYear will be the series’ start year.

From the visualization, we can see that the distribution of gender is not significant across the years. The people who are male or female in the film industry are spread out evenly. Perhaps we may think that as women involved in the social movement increases, the popularity of the representation of women in the film industry would increase. However, we do not see a clear sign that women’s involvement in the social movements is affecting the popularity of various films and media (especially IMDB) from the catplot even when we can see a huge difference when the tweets mention “me too” from the initial year and the recent year.

Conclusion:

We still have a long way to go when it comes to female representation in the media, as seen by the insignificance of social movements such as #MeToo is increasing the same. Women continue to be neglected when it comes to casting. For instance, the roles of women in action-based films, which are deemed as more masculine are often restricted to being ‘pretty’ and needing to be saved by the male lead. Additionally, the increasing number of movies by rating and budget that continue to fail the Bechdel test further suggests that the film industry continues to have a gender bias when it comes to producing large-scale films. In addition to our general analysis, the conclusions that we have found through the Bechdel test suggest that while this test may be an appropriate starting point for considering female representation, there are a significant number of other factors that one must consider outside of the test when it comes to gauging the female industry’s gender bias. As a society, not only do we have to do more to pave the way for increased female representation, but we need to consider a more appropriate measuring system for female representation for analysis.