"Roles for the boys?" Mining cast lists for gender and role distributions over time

TL;DR

This paper uses cast list data from media databases to analyze gender and role distributions in film and TV over time, offering a scalable alternative to video annotation.

Contribution

It introduces a methodology for mining cast lists to study gender representation and compares online data with census figures, highlighting differences and potential insights.

Findings

Differences between cast list gender proportions and US Census data.

Cast list analysis reveals trends in gender roles over time.

Methodology provides a scalable tool for gender representation studies.

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 onscreen gender depictions and how they change over time. We find differences between web-mediated onscreen gender proportions and those from US Census data. We propose these methodologies are a useful adjunct to traditional analysis that allow researchers to explore the relationship between online and onscreen gender depictions.