A Century of Gender Bias in the Film Industry: Men have a Career whereas Women are Married

Anonymous

Abstract: Movies play a crucial role in forming the perception and the mentality of masses about the society. Existence of bias and stereotypes in movies can harmfully reinforce and internalize negative biases in the audience. We present a study of gender bias prevalence in movie plots using a novel event chain-based feature extraction method. In our study, we model movies as sequences of events that correspond to the underlying characters and explore the effect of events on the way characters are described in movie plots. To increase our outreach, our study is performed over a century of data and includes movie plots from three most-watched film industries: Hollywood, Cinema of India, and Cinema of the United Kingdom. We demonstrate that our method quantitatively demonstrates existence of gender bias in movie plots as gendered characters evolve during movies. Our study is worrisome but at the same, our temporal analysis indicates that gender bias has a decreasing trend over the past century.

Paper Type: short