Women and Movies

The representation of women in media has long been a topic of interest, as it reflects societal norms and attitudes towards gender equality. Despite the progress made in recent decades towards gender equality, it is important to examine whether these changes are reflected in the films we watch. Movies provide a unique insight into the subconscious ways in which society is conditioned to view women, and can capture the ideals and norms of the time in which they were produced.

In this data analysis project, we will use the CMU Movie Summary Corpus, completed with additional datasets, to explore the portrayal of women in film. We will not only analyze the roles of actresses and characters, but also of writers and directors. By analyzing these factors, we aim to gain a deeper understanding of how women are and have been represented in media, and how this has evolved through time.

The Data

Our analysis is based on merging the CMU Movie Summary Corpus, the Stanford CoreNLP-processed summaries, IMDb, Wikidata, IMDB and Box office Mojo. We have separated the data into three tables: the movies table, the characters table, and the directors and writers table.

• The movies table contains titles, release year, runtime, box office revenue, average rating and number of votes on IMDb, genre, as well as the list of directors and writers. There are a total of 81,741 different movies.