A quantitative analysis of gender differences in movies using psycholinguistic normatives

Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1996–2001, Lisbon, Portugal, 17-21 September 2015. c⃝2015 Association for Computational Linguistics. A quantitative analysis of gender differences in movies using psycholinguistic normatives Anil Ramakrishna1, Nikolaos Malandrakis1, Elizabeth Staruk1, Shrikanth Narayanan1, 2 1Department of Computer Science, 2Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA {akramakr,malandra,staruk}@usc.edu, shri@sipi.usc.edu Abstract Direct content analysis reveals important details about movies including those of gender representations and potential bi- ases. We investigate the differences be- tween male and female character depic- tions in movies, based on patterns of lan- guage used. Specifically, we use an au- tomatically generated lexicon of linguis- tic norms characterizing gender ladenness. We use multivariate analysis to investigate gender depictions and correlate them with elements of movie production. The pro- posed metric differentiates between male and female utterances and exhibits some interesting interactions with movie genres and the screenplay writer gender. 1 Introduction Gender has been an important research topic in the social sciences, with studies conducted on the ef- fect of gender on various aspects of human percep- tion and expression (Benshoff and Griffin, 2011) as well as investigations of the societal (Behm- Morawitz and Mastro, 2008) and career implica- tions of gender and possible underlying biases. Previous studies report significant implications of gender on career progress in medicine (Sidhu et al., 2009), information technology (Cohoon and Aspray, 2006), politics (Niven, 2006) and show- business (Smith, 2010). In this paper we investigate the depictions of the genders in feature films, through the analysis of their respective dialogues. The differences in depiction are a contentious subject, since aspects of these can be viewed as the result of stereotyp- ing or gender bias, with the relative presence of women being a well investigated subject (Bielby and Bielby, 1996; Lincoln and Allen, 2004). We are interested in the existing gender depictions, re- gardless of relative frequencies, as well as any fac- tors that may affect them. While popular tools such as the Bechdel test provide a test for detecting female presence in the movies, we hope to iden- tify more subtle forms of gender differences across character gender from the dialogues. Our aim is to devise a non-binary metric that can be used to compare or rank movies, characters and perhaps individual utterances. To analyze the dialogues we propose using a metric of language gender ladenness, a num- ber representing a normative rating of the “per- ceived feminine or masculine association” (Paivio et al., 1968) of language. The metric, as origi- nally defined, is meant to provide an indication of gender-specificity of individual words, with ex- treme values assigned to highly stereotypical con- cepts. Generating this rating for male and fe- male character dialogues and comparing the char- acter gender with this rating of “language gender” should allow us to observe stereotypical behavior. Word based ratings such as the gender laden- ness are referred to as linguistic norms (or psy- cholinguistic norms when corresponding to psy- chological constructs) and …

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