Proportion of women and men in leading roles for Hollywood movies.

Hi all,

Sexism in Hollywood has become a hot topic these days. Stories like these and opinion pieces like these are all too common.

I recently came upon a interesting data set which gives the relative order in which each character appears in the credits for each movie (among other interesting data which I didn't include here). Technical note: This data set includes 9035 characters from 617 movies. However, sex and credit position was available only for 2298 characters and isn't complete for the majority of the movies. As far as I can tell, there isn't any obvious bias towards action (male oriented) vs. romance movies (female oriented). Feel free to criticize the analysis or give suggestions for interpreting the data differently.

When I calculated the relative appearance of each sex for each credit position, it's clear that there's a huge male dominance for the first position (>80%) and a general skewing (~%60) towards men in positions #3-10. Oddly enough, second position is evenly split between men and women.

Relative proportion of Women and Men in the credit order for 617 movies (click to zoom)

Raw numbers for each position

In conclusion, the data definitely supports the idea that men are way over-represented in leading roles in hollywood movies.