Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels of Polygraph recently analyzed over 2,000 screenplays to research gender trends in Hollywood movies.
They state:
“We compiled the number of words spoken by male and female characters across roughly 2,000 films, arguably the largest undertaking of script analysis, ever.”
Their conclusion:
“Across thousands of films in our dataset, it was hard to find a subset that didn’t over-index male. Even romantic comedies have dialogue that is, on average, 58% male.”
Other takeaways:
- Only 22% of the films featured female leads.
- 38% of dialogue spoken by women is by women 22-31 years old.
- 39% of dialogue spoken by men is by men 42-65 years old.
My take: kudos to the team for doing this analysis — it confirms what we already knew. I particularly like their interactive charts! For more data on Hollywood, see this.