Quantifying Women's Marginalisation in Ibero-American Film Culture During the First Half of the Twentieth Century: A Network-Science Proposal

TL;DR

This study employs social network analysis to quantitatively demonstrate the historical marginalisation of women in Ibero-American film culture during the early 20th century, revealing their peripheral position in the cultural network.

Contribution

It introduces a novel network-science methodology with large historical data to analyze women's roles and marginalisation in early 20th-century Ibero-American cinema.

Findings

Women occupied outer $k$-shells in the network

Women’s distribution was non-uniform across shells

Results suggest limited participation of women in public sphere

Abstract

The research presented here uses the tools of social network analysis to empirically show a socio-cultural phenomenon already addressed by the social sciences and history: the historical marginalisation of women in the field of cinema. The novelty of our approach lies in the use of a large amount of heterogeneous historical data. On the one hand, we built a network of interactions between people involved in the film field in Ibero-America during the first half of the twentieth century. On the other hand, we propose a $k$-core decomposition and a multi-layered analysis, as a quantitative way to study the position of women within the cultural melieu. After conducting our analysis, we concluded that women were mostly situated in the outer $k$-shells of the empirical network, and their distribution was not uniform across the $k$-shells. From a qualitative perspective, these results can be interpreted as the consequence of the lack of evidence of the participation of women in the public sphere.