Acoording to a recent study reported in The Independent, language of characters in almost 1,000 film scripts has revealed how sexism is embodied by characters on the silver screen.
Using automated tools for linguistic analysis, the research found that women characters tend to be around five years younger than their male partners, according to a report in Times.
If female characters are taken out of the plot, it often makes no difference to the story, found a study due to be published in the Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
The research by USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab (SAIL), found that women’s roles were more often focused on issues using ‘language connecting with family values’.
Men’s language was linked with achievement, while their conversations contained more swear words and was associated with sex and death.
Men also had substantially more lines – 37,000 dialogues – whereas women had just over 15,000.
“Writers consciously or subconsciously agree to established norms about gender that are built into their word choices,” Anil Ramakrishna, one of the study’s researchers, said in the newspaper report.
Upon analysis of the scripts, the study found that there were seven times more male than female writers and 12 times more male directors than women.
The biggest impact in counteracting the gender imbalance was if female writers were present at script meetings. If this was the case, female characters on screen was around 50% greater, the study found.
