Actor and equality campaigner Geena Davis has announced that Disney has adopted a digital tool that will analyse scripts and identify opportunities to rectify any gender and ethnic biases. Davis, founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, was speaking at the Power of Inclusion event in New Zealand, where she outlined the development of GD-IQ: Spellcheck for Bias, a machine learning tool described as "an intervention tool to infuse diversity and inclusion in entertainment and media". Developed by the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, the Spellcheck for Bias is designed to analyse a script and determine the percentages of characters' "gender, race, LGBTQIA [and] disabilities". It can also track the percentage of "non-gender-defined speaking characters". Davis said that Disney had partnered with her institute to pilot the project: "We're going to collaborate with Disney over the next year using this tool to help their decision-making [and] identify opportunities to increase diversity and inclusion in the manuscripts that they receive. We're very excited about the possibilities with this new technology and we encourage everybody to get in touch with us and give it a try."

It's no secret that Disney films of yore had been plagued with racism and sexism. The company's movies have gotten more progressive in recent years --see Brave, Frozen, and Moana--but there's still lots more work to do. And now, Disney has pledged to tackle diversity in storytelling and gender bias with a little help from AI. The company has teamed up with Geena Davis and her Institute on Gender in Media to use GD-IQ: Spellcheck for Bias (Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient), a tool that analyzes TV and movie scripts to track gender and other biases. The software, codeveloped by the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, evaluates the number of male and female characters, how many characters are part of the LGBTQIA community, how many people of color are included, and how many disabled people are represented.