By Ila Ananya
Women only said 27 percent of the words in Hollywood’s biggest movies in 2016.
If you’ve suspected something like this for a while now, Amber Thomas, who calls herself an aspiring data scientist, has the data to prove it. We recently stumbled across her study, and as she says, not even one of the top 10 movies of 2016 had a 50 percent speaking female cast. And only one movie had 50 percent dialogue by a female character.
For her study, Thomas looked at the movie’s dialogue so that she could cut out characters who didn’t talk from the analysis. Then she went through transcripts of the movies available online, or used closed-caption files for those without transcripts — a process that took much longer. Finally, after she got her data, she decided to make interactive graphics. In the graphics, each bubble represents a character, and the bubble’s size depends on the number of words spoken. Of course, all female characters get a pink bubble, and male characters get a blue one.
Here are some of the things Thomas found about the highest grossing movies of 2016:
Captain America: Civil War had 28 percent female characters and 72 percent men. So it shouldn’t be surprising that just 16 percent of the dialogue was by women. In the final battle, the female characters were outnumbered 5:1.
Finding Dory had the most promising results. 42 percent of its characters were female, and 58 percent were male. Out of the 53 percent female dialogue, 76 percent of it came from just Dory.
Zootopia followed Finding Dory with 38 percent of female characters who spoke 46 percent of the dialogue. Judy Hopps, its main character, spoke 3114 words — the most in the movie.
The Jungle Book unsurprisingly had just 21 percent female characters, who spoke 10 percent of the dialogue. We’ll just leave these numbers here.
The Secret Life of Pets had 27 percent female characters who spoke 19 percent of the dialogue.
Suicide Squad has 22 percent female characters who spoke 32 percent of the dialogue. This was despite Harley Quinn being the most advertised character of the movie.
Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice had Batman speaking 2.4 times more than Superman. And 6 times more than Wonder Woman. No wonder there were just 24 percent female characters who spoke 23 percent of the dialogue.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story had the worst data. Only 9 percent of its speaking characters were female—that is, 10 of the characters were women. 78 percent of the dialogue from women came from Jyn Erso.
Deadpool had just 17 percent of female dialogue. And while Deadpool spoke 4692 words, Venessa, the woman with the most dialogue, spoke 442 words.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them had 32 percent female dialogue and characters. As opposed to the 68 percent for the men.
Why are we not surprised?