Remi Lin 411110208

S1

CCII, Group B

October 24, 2023

“Identifying Gender Bias in Blockbuster Movies through the Lens of Machine

Learning” by Muhammad Junaid Haris et al. reveals that gender bias exists in blockbuster

movies. With a large audience, movies significantly influence the trends and thoughts of

people. To analyze gender bias in the films, the group applies an artificial intelligence known

as the Natural Language Processing technique to 34 English blockbuster movies from IMDb

in different genres from 1972 to 2021. The research team uses computer programs to examine

the film. The computer program will convert the files of scripts into HTML. The scripts are

categorized into separate scenarios and dialogues, and the characters will be marked with

their genders. Characters involved in less than five dialogues will be dropped during the

process.

Then, the team uses programs to recognize the positive and negative sentiments of

characters and analyze the existence of gender biases in the film. The result shows that

female characters present more emotions such as joy, while male characters present emotions

like aggressiveness, anger, and dominance. Meanwhile, female characters present fewer

changes in emotion compared to male characters, which implies that the characters of the two

sexes are written in different ways. In addition, there is a division between male and female

characters in their talking. Female characters have dialogues related to clothes and household

chores more frequently. In contrast, male characters tend to have dialogues about business

and the world, showing that males are more attentive to ambitions, corresponding to the

gender stereotype. Even though there is already an improvement in the distribution of male

and female characters, which can be seen from the increasing numbers of female characters
from 2004 to 2019, gender biases exist in films. Scriptwriters and movie producers should be

aware of the stereotypes that may be contained in the movie, for their inestimable influence

on the world.

Word Counts: 308

 Work Cited

Haris, Muhammad Junaid, et al. “Identifying Gender Bias in Blockbuster Movies through the

Lens of Machine Learning.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, vol.

10, no. 1, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-01576-3.