Men 'seen and heard' twice as much as women in 2015's top movies

Women in the movies of 2015 were given half the screen time and half the dialogue of their male counterparts, according to new research.

The University of Southern California and Google gleaned the figures from new ‘machine-learning’ software, which was also made with backing from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.

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The programme is able to automatically measure screen and speech time on screen, then attribute it to gender.

And the results that emerged, taken from the top grossing 200 films of 2015, were pretty shocking.

Movies with a male lead were found to have three times more dialogue and three times more screen time than females, which is of course skewed heavily but perhaps more understandable.

But in films where it was a co-lead situation, males still took the lion’s share of the dialogue and screen time, and when the movie featured a dedicated female lead – which was about 17 percent of 2015’s movies – men had roughly equal dialogue and screen time.

Box office revenue was collated, which produced similarly interesting results.

On average, movies with a female lead took in a figure of $89.9 million – 15.8 percent more than the average take of a movie with a male lead.

That result, according to the Geena Davis Institute, trashes the notion that ‘female leads are not bankable’.