Polygraph is a website that uses coding and art to tell visual stories about data from pop culture. They present visually-pleasing and easy-to-understand charts analysing things like how long it takes pop songs to reach a billion views on YouTube or which rappers have the largest vocabulary. The most interesting data visualisation they’ve supplied recently has been an analysis of Hollywood’s gender divide and it doesn’t look good.

Polygraph has published pieces about gender in film before. Their Bechdel test piece was very popular but also divisive. The Bechdel test asks if a film has at least two women in it who talk to each other about something other than a man. Polygraph highlight the 200 highest grossing films and their Bechdel test results but also looked at the gender diversity of their writers and directors.

“Girls, we do not, in fact, run this mother. Men are pervasive in startups, CEOs, engineering, politics – Hollywood is no exception. But in Hollywood, it’s plainly visible in the product. When men make films, what’s on-screen reflects the behind-the-scenes brotopia.”

When writers are all male, most films fail the test. Commenters have criticised that piece claiming the Bechdel test isn’t reliable. Without the test that leaves us with women in the industry telling us that there’s a gender diversity problem, but hearing directly from women isn’t enough to convince most people.

To try and educate the people who just won’t listen to the women in the industry, Polygraph has taken a different approach to bring data to the people. This time, Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels have done the largest analysis of film dialogue by gender ever, working their way through 4 million lines spoken by 25,000 actors in 2,000 screenplays. Now we can see film dialogue broken down by both gender and age and the results undeniably highlight problems in Hollywood. Before diving in to all 2000 scripts, the team looked at Disney alone.