Gender Representation in Cinematic Content

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to enable an objective understanding of gender portrayals in popular films and media through multimodal content analysis. An automated system for analyzing gender representation in terms of screen presence and speaking time is developed. First, we perform independent processing of the video and the audio content to estimate gender distribution of screen presence at shot level, and of speech at utterance level. A measure of the movie's excitement or intensity is computed using audiovisual features for every scene. This measure is used as a weighting function to combine the gender-based screen/speaking time information at shot/utterance level to compute gender representation for the entire movie. Detailed results and analyses are presented on seventeen full length Hollywood movies.