A recent study 2 000 Hollywood films released since 1980 has thrown a spotlight on how little dialogue women have in screenplays

Out of the 2 000 randomly selected flicks, 1 513 of the male characters have 60% of the entire film’s dialogue, while only 314 have dialogue almost equally balanced between the two genders.

This is according to data research by Polygraph’s Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels, who analysed thousands of screenplays, breaking them right down to the number of words spoken by male and female characters of different ages.

Anderson and Daniels Googled 8 000 screenplays, matched each character’s lines to an actor and compiled the number of words spoken by male and female characters across roughly 2 000 films, mapping characters with at least 100 words of dialogue to the actor’s IMDb page.

You can view dialogue data for each character in the charts by hovering over the movie titles.

Some movies with female leads saw an overall dialogue skew towards more males because the number of the latter characters cast outweighed the former.

Just 22% of the films had female characters with the most dialogue in them.

Leading roles are also (not surprisingly) skewed heavily towards more men (which would also explain the dialogue skew). “Women occupy at least two of the top three roles in a film, which occurs in 18% of our films. That same scenario for men occurs in about 82% of films,” Anderson and Daniels say.

In terms of age, older men are more favoured, while younger women have more dialogue.

“This project was born out of the less-than-stellar response to our analysis of films that fail the Bechdel Test [which asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man],” the pair says.

“Commenters were quick to point out that the Bechdel Test is flawed and there are justifiable reasons for films to fail (eg, they are historic). By measuring dialogue, we have much more objective view of gender in film.”

You can see more charts on Polygraph.

[Source – Polygraph, image – Macolm X trailer]