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.