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Half a Century of Stereotyping Associations Between Gender and Intellectual Ability in Films

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Abstract

A particularly longstanding, prevalent, and well-documented stereotype is the belief that men possess higher-level cognitive abilities than women do. This brilliance = male stereotype has been shown to be endorsed even by children as young as 6-years-old and is believed to be a factor driving the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields. Motivated by the fact that cultural products serve as a source for acquiring individual values and behaviors, we study the presence of this stereotype in a large collection of movie transcripts covering half a century of Western-world film history (n = 11,550). Concretely, we use natural language processing techniques to quantify associations between gender pronouns and high-level cognitive ability-related words. Overall, our estimates suggest that, at an aggregate level, the brilliance = male stereotype is effectively present in films and that movies specifically targeted at children contain this stereotypical association. Moreover, this pattern seems to have been quite persistent for the last 50 years.

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  • 11 April 2019

    The original version of the article unfortunately contained errors.

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Acknowledgements

We thank OpenSubtitles.org administrators (www.opensubtitles.org) for their invaluable help in gathering subtitle data. We also thank Luciana Ferrer, Carlos Diuk, Diego Fernández Slezak, Julieta Schiro and Agustín Gravano for fruitful discussions and useful comments on the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Computación, FCEyN, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Ramiro H. Gálvez, Valeria Tiffenberg & Edgar Altszyler

  2. Instituto de Ciencias de la Computación, CONICET-UBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Ramiro H. Gálvez & Edgar Altszyler

  3. Fundación Sadosky, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Edgar Altszyler

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  1. Ramiro H. Gálvez
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  2. Valeria Tiffenberg
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  3. Edgar Altszyler
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Correspondence to Ramiro H. Gálvez.

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The original version of this article was revised: In Fig. 3, panel b, the gray shades were captured on top of the lines instead as a background.

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Gálvez, R.H., Tiffenberg, V. & Altszyler, E. Half a Century of Stereotyping Associations Between Gender and Intellectual Ability in Films. Sex Roles 81, 643–654 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-019-01019-x

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