Men were seen and heard twice as much as women in 2015’s top films

Men were seen and heard about twice as much as women in the 200 highest-grossing films of 2015. The figures come from a new machine-learning technology developed by researchers at Google and the University of Southern California to analyze the role of women in film.

The software, created with backing from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and Google’s philanthropic division, is the first to automatically measure how screen and speaking time in film and TV break down by gender. In the past, researchers fulfilled this task with time-intensive, manual hand-coding. The data shows that, when the film had a male lead, male characters appeared on screen and spoke about three times more often than female characters in 2015. In films with both male and female co-leads, men still had far more speaking and screen time. And even in films with female leads — about 17 percent of the top-grossing films in 2015 — men had a roughly equal amount of screen and speaking time as women.