The Data Behind Hollywood’s Sexism

Hey everyone, today I reviewed a ted talk: 'The Data behind Hollywood’s sexism’ by Stacy Smith. She describes how her team and herself performed a study to see how many females and males spoke in 30 different films. Whichever actor said just one word, their gender would be noted. As this study reached an end, the results obtained were astonishing. There were approximately 3 males for every 1 female on average in a given film.

The team had used data to figure out a problem in the film industry, which proves two things. Firstly, by using data to figure out a problem, it shows the power of data. Secondly, and more importantly, the data reported that women were not as included as men in films. Smith describes how, in most films, women were not the main character, especially black women. Furthermore, this isn’t only true in this generation, women haven’t been very included in the film industry for over half a century.

This, however, is much worse ‘behind the cameras.’ Smith explains how most film directors are males, only 4.1% of directors are females. That means only 1 in every 25 directors are females.

Fortunately, gender equality in the film industry can soon exist if some steps are taken. By the help of data, Smith’s team was successfully able to understand what it would take to bring equality to Hollywood. Her method is called ‘just add five.’ If, for the next 100 movies in a given year, casting directors hired just 5 more female actors to speak in the film, and this process be continued for 3 years, it would eliminate the gender inequality, and the ratio of males to females in films would be approximately 1:1.

Data is extremely powerful, and surprisingly useful. From this example, we see that, 1) data was used to identify a problem, gender inequality in the film industry, and 2) data was used to find a solution to this problem, the ‘just add five’ process. This is only one example where data can be used to solve a big problem; data, if used correctly, can identify and solve tons of other problems in the modern world.