The goal with any society is to get better at stuff, to learn from mistakes and evolve, gradually, over time, to become the best version of itself. But for all the woke baes and social justice awareness out there, it looks like movies still have a long way to go. A new study has found that white men still get the most dialogue in today’s cinema, and women and minorities are still often relegated to stereotypical, nonessential roles.

The study, conducted by the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering, went over 1,000 popular scripts from the last several decades and found that, of the 7,000 characters studied in the scripts, about 4,900 were men and just over 2,000 were women. 37,000 instances of dialogue in the scripts involved men and only 15,000 involved women.

When they analyzed what people actually said in those conversations, familiar stereotype behaviors started to emerge. Men would more often talk about accomplishments, women would be more positive, black characters were more likely to swear, and Latinos were more likely to have discussions involving sexuality.

Another troubling aspect of the study involved mapping the characters in the narrative and their relationships to one another. They found that if a female character was removed from the story, not much was changed — except in horror movies, where women are more often victims.

The folks making these movies might have something to do with their content. Of the scripts in the story, there were seven times more male writers than female ones, about 12 times more male directors, and over three times more male producers. And get this: when women wrote the stories, the number of female characters increased by 50 percent. Totally didn’t see that one coming. Not at all.

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