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Measuring Female Representation and Impact in Films over Time

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Published:25 November 2020Publication History
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Abstract

Women have always been underrepresented in movies and not until recently has the representation of women in movies improved. To investigate the improvement of female representation and its relationship with a movie’s success, we propose a new measure, the female cast ratio, and compare it to the commonly used Bechdel test result. We employ generalized linear regression with L1 penalty and a Random Forest model to identify the predictors that influence female representation, and evaluate the relationship between female representation and a movie’s success in three aspects: revenue/budget ratio, rating, and popularity. Three important findings in our study have highlighted the difficulties women in the film industry face both upstream and downstream. First, female filmmakers, especially female screenplay writers, are instrumental for movies to have better female representation, but the percentage of female filmmakers has been very low. Second, movies that have the potential to tell insightful stories about women are often provided with lower budgets, and this usually causes the films to in turn receive more criticism. Finally, the demand for better female representation from moviegoers has also not been strong enough to compel the film industry to change, as movies that have poor female representation can still be very popular and successful in the box office.

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM/IMS Transactions on Data Science
        ACM/IMS Transactions on Data Science  Volume 1, Issue 4
        Special Issue on Retrieving and Learning from IoT Data and Regular Papers
        November 2020
        148 pages
        ISSN:2691-1922
        DOI:10.1145/3439709
        Issue’s Table of Contents

        Copyright © 2020 ACM

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 25 November 2020
        • Accepted: 1 July 2020
        • Revised: 1 June 2020
        • Received: 1 April 2020
        Published in tds Volume 1, Issue 4

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