Female Screentime Disproportionate to Men Can Now Be Analyzed With New Technology
It’s no secret that men and women aren’t exactly treated equally in the film industry, and new technology is allowing researchers to quantify at least one disparity: screentime. Mount Saint Mary’s University’s Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media is set to announce the Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient (GD-IQ): “a tool that employs video- and audio-recognition technology, along with algorithms, to identify gender, speaking time and additional details about characters presented in films, television shows and other media,” reports the New York Times.
“The research is a tool to help inspire change,” said Madeline Di Nonno, chief executive of the Geena Davis Institute. “It’s not meant to criticize; it’s meant to have the facts so that content creators can be aware and learn from it.” The software is a quicker, automated means of data collection; it has the potential to analyze a 90-minute film with a higher degree of accuracy than a human in just 15 minutes.
READ MORE: Geena Davis Producing Documentary On Systemic Gender Inequality in Hollywood
The first round of research, which focused on the 200 most profitable live-action films released in 2014 and 2015, found that male characters were seen and heard about twice as often as their female counterparts.
Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
