Popular culture plays an important role in shaping society’s perceptions and attitudes regarding gender roles. We receive images and stories through television, film, music and social media that reinforce or challenge traditional gender roles.
With billions of viewers worldwide, the film industry is one of the most influential media industries and plays a particularly central role in portraying gender roles.
A team of international students in the Erasmus Mundus Double Degree Program Engineering of Data-Intensive Intelligent Software Systems (EDISS) at Obo Akademi University recently published an article titled “Identifying Gender Bias in Blockbuster Films Through the Lens of Machine Learning.” humanities and social science journals.
The student team consisted of Muhammad Junaid Haris, Aanchal Upreti and Melih Kurtaran. This work was advised by Sébastien Lafond and his Sepinoud Azimi from the Subject Cluster Information Technology at the University of Oboacademi, with Filip Ginter from the University of Turku as a collaborator.
In this study, students used mathematical and machine learning techniques to analyze the manuscripts of 34 Hollywood films of various genres to see how gender roles were presented in the films and how emotions were differentiated between males and females. I examined how it was expressed by the characters of.
The results show that there are still certain patterns in the personality traits of male and female characters in movies that are consistent with social stereotypes. Dominant and jealous, women show themselves to be more loving, caring, happy and submissive.
The analysis also showed that gender representation has become more equal over the past two decades. From 2000 until 2004, only 15% of her characters were female, but from 2015 he saw that number increase to almost 44% in 2019.
“To our knowledge, this is the first time a blockbuster character’s emotional expression has been explored in greater depth. While women’s roles have evolved and become more prominent on screen over the years, There are still a lot of stereotypes about gender roles under the surface,” says Sepinou Azimi.
For more information:
Muhammad Junaid Haris et al., Identifying Gender Bias in Blockbuster Movies Through a Machine Learning Lens, humanities and social sciences communication (2023). DOI: 10.1057/s41599-023-01576-3
Provided by Abo Academi University
