Women In The Movies Get Less Dialogue The Older They Get, Says Study

The older actresses get in the movie business, the less dialogue they get, according to a new study.

2000 films were dissected by the data-crunching website Polygraph, and the results were pretty damning.

Women between the ages of 22 and 31 take 38% of the dialogue, while the figure falls to 31% if you’re aged 32 to 41, and down to a lowly 20% if you’re 42 to 65.

This is far from the case if you’re a male in the movies.

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Men in the 42 to 65 age bracket snare 39% of dialogue, more than the youngest age range in women.

Both sexes see a substantial drop off after 65, however, with 5% of dialogue for men, and just 3% for women.

As if that wasn’t depressing enough, the findings also highlighted the fact that females frequently get less dialogue than men in movies purported to be focussed on female characters.

In Disney’s ‘Pocahontas’ and 'The Little Mermaid’, male characters snared at least 70% of the dialogue, and in 'Mulan’, the figure was 75% - with Mulan’s dragon protector Mushu having 50% more words than the lead character herself.

Disney films in general come out pretty badly in terms of the gender split, with a huge number of its movies being skewed towards male characters.

98% of the dialogue in 'The Jungle Book’ is spoken by males, along with the vast majority of 'Monsters Inc’, 'Up’, 'Toy Story’ and 'Aladdin’.

Polygraph reported research in January this year that men speak more than women in movies about the Disney princesses, with 22 out of 30 movies finding male characters taking the majority of the dialogue.

The findings are another damning indictment of the male-centric movie business.

The study’s authors Hannah Anderson and Matt Daniels said: “This project was born out of the less-than-stellar response to our analysis of films that fail the Bechdel Test [to pass a film needs to have at least two women in it, who talk to each other about something besides a man]. Commenters were quick to point out that the Bechdel Test is flawed and there are justifiable reasons for films to fail (e.g., they are historic).

“By measuring dialogue, we have much more objective view of gender in film. Many of readers are drawing conclusions that were anecdotally obvious to women in the film industry. But nobody wanted to do the grunt work of gathering the data. We spent weeks just matching scripts to IMDB pages. It’s still not perfect, but we’re now in a much better place than 'you know… women are never love-interests when they’re older than 40’.”

Image credit: PA/Disney