A new study breaks down Hollywood speaking lines by age and sex and the results are surprising.
The good folks over at Polygraph have created an interactive set of graphics to highlight the number of speaking lines in 2000 movie screenplays, with IMDB look-ups of actor, age and gender. In January 2016, researchers reported that men speak more often than women in Disney’s princess films so, researchers decided to dig deeper into Hollywood and figure how many speaking lines do men get versus women and the results were surprising. Frozen, for instance, gave more than half the lines to male characters.
They’ve also made a lot of data available on for other people to use. Here’s a graph combining the age and gender data in a different way than they did: total number of speaking lines by age and gender.
It’s interesting to highlight that men and women have similar number of speaking lines up to age 30, but after that there’s a huge separation and much less opportunity for female actors. While there are some exceptions such as Judi Dench, and Maggie Smith, a large majority of actresses’ careers end at the young age of 30.
You can read the full study here.
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