Machine learning reveals lack of female screen time in top films

Machine learning is taking on Hollywood's gender bias. Technology that automatically detects how often men and women appear on screen reveals that in recent popular films, men have had almost twice as much screen time as women. The software uses algorithms for face and voice recognition that have been trained on annotated video to identify whether a character is male or female, and can measure how long they are on screen to a fraction of a second. It was developed by Shri Narayanan at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in partnership with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and Google.org, the search engine's charitable arm. In an analysis of the 100 highest-grossing live-action films from each of the past three years, the software found that women appear on average for just 36 per cent of the total time that characters are on screen.