Tracking onscreen gender and role bias over time

Abstract

Film and television play an important role in popular culture. However studies that require watching and annotating video are time-consuming and expensive to run at scale. We explore information mined from media database cast lists to explore the evolution of different roles over time. We focus on the gender distribution of those roles and how this changes over time. We compare real-life em- ployment gender distributions to our web-mediated onscreen gender data. Finally, we investigate how gender role biases differ between film and television. We propose these methodologies are a useful adjunct to traditional analysis that allow researchers to explore the relationship between online and on- screen gender depictions.