Gender (im)parity in Hollywood

(Originally posted to the Community section of MyMedia)

Do you like graphs and statistical analysis based on data you can gather independently, and thus replicate the study and corroborate or debunk its results?

Then check out this wonderfully thorough analysis of the gender imbalance in the movie industry:

Lately, Hollywood has been taking so much shit for rampant sexism and racism. The prevailing theme: white men dominate movie roles.
But it’s all rhetoric and no data, which gets us nowhere in terms of having an informed discussion. How many movies are actually about men? What changes by genre, era, or box-office revenue? What circumstances generate more diversity?

To begin answering these questions, we Googled our way to 8,000 screenplays and matched each character’s lines to an actor. From there, we compiled the number of lines for male and female characters across roughly 2,000 films, arguably the largest undertaking of script analysis, ever.

Personally, I love that the authors of this study undertook what is, unarguably, a mammoth project of this kind, in response to what they consider valid criticism of a previous analysis of film’s gender bias.