Bechdel-Wallace Test Automation

Authors

  • José Nahuel Freitas CONICET - Universidad de Buenos Aires.
  • Milena Rosenzvit
  • Stephanie Muller

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31056/2250.5415.v6.n3.16498

Keywords:

Bechdel-Wallace test, Gender inequality, Automatic text analysis, Script analysis

Abstract

A movie is considered to pass the Bechdel-Wallace if it satisfy three conditions: 1) there are at least two women characters that 2) talk to each other at some point 3) about something that is not related to a men. It is believed that about 40% of movies fail to pass the test. In spite of the great potential of this tool to make visible the gender inequality in cinema, since its introduction in 1995, an automatic version of it is still to be developed. That was the purpose of this work. The developed test enabled us, through the analysis of movie scripts obtained from the site imdb.com, obtain evidence that the number of movies that pass the test is even lower than previous estimations. Also, this program allows to analyse large sets of scripts as a function of the cinematographic genre.

References

Bechdel, A. (1986). Dykes to watch out for. Firebrand Books.

Van Rossum, G. (1995) Python tutorial, Technical Report CS-R9526, Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam.

Woolf, V. (1957). “A Room of One’s Own. 1929.” New York: HBJ.

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Published

2016-11-01

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Section

Artículos

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