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

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.