In order to do this we have to define these terms more clearly. What is diversity and equality and how do you measure it? 

Diversity in itself can mean a lot of different things. Only within the media industry it can refer to the variation of genres that are broadcast on a certain channel, the range of political views expressed by a newspaper, or simply the differences in opinion shown on a public TV station. 

But it can also have the meaning it gets when you put it together with the word “equality” – suddenly it refers to social justice, sustainability, societal development and human rights. This is the kind of diversity we are talking about. 

Diversity has two pillars. It is when all groups of our society* are represented to approximately the same extent as the portion of the community they make up, and when they are portrayed without being stereotyped. 

Representation is measured in numbers. In media this can for example be done using the questions “how much air time do black people get on the news?” or “how many women are on this panel?” Unfortunately today, white, middle aged, cis men are heavily over-represented in media and entertainment compared to how big a portion of the world they actually make up. This presents us, the audiences, with a skewed image of the world and drives us to unconsciously make biased assumptions about this world, and about other people. And in fact, without representation we cannot have democracy – because representation is the very foundation of democracy. 

Portrayal is much harder to measure, but it has to do with the following questions:

• In which roles are different groups of people presented to us?
• Which themes do different groups of people get to talk about?
• Which norms exist in our society and does this TV show or movie we’re watching reinforce them or go against them?
• Which stereotypes are we shown that feed us unconscious biases?

Representation is the foundation of democracy.

Naturally, in order to be able to understand and measure diversity, especially portrayal, you have to be very educated in social sciences. In our next post we will discuss how this should be done properly. But before that let’s try to answer the question: why these two? Why representation and portrayal? 

Because they are what the audiences see. What builds our world is the lense we see it through; the truths we hold, the rules we obey, and the assumptions we make. That’s why our mission, to create a more equal and tolerant world, must start with the audiences. We ask ourselves: How much diversity is an average member of the audience presented with in their media and entertainment consumption? Is diversified content available to them and allowed to influence their view of the world? 

Generation Z and younger are much more value-driven and willing to question inequalities than any generation before them. 

The human brain works in simplifications and generalisations. Increasing diversity adds complexity. However, we believe it is counter productive for society to over-simplify the complexities around us by stereotyping and by limiting the variety of answers to the question “what does it mean to be human” – which is essentially what happens if I am only shown a white, male world through the lens of a white, male director. We also believe that humanity is ready to embrace, work with, and find answers to more complex questions than ever before. Generation Z and younger are much more value-driven and willing to question inequalities than any generation before them. 

We believe that our definition of diversity can be applied to any other field outside of media and entertainment. Which groups of society are represented in your community, in your school, on your company’s board? And in which roles? In which way are they and their tasks portrayed by branding or PR initiatives, by the headmaster of the school, in the company’s annual report? These are questions that matter today, and that will matter even more tomorrow.

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The global digital event will start in the US on June 18th at 16.00 CET, and will run across the globe for 24 hours before wrapping up in Asia on June 19th.

Ceretai will be pitching in front of thousands of investors from around the world – presenting their vision and their software-as-a-service Diversity Dashboard that offers media houses an innovative way to monitor diversity and inclusion in media and entertainment content.

This important event will mark the opening of the company’s new investment round, which will close in Q3. 

CEO and co-founder of Ceretai Matilda Kong will be joining the event from Stockholm. She is excited, but also wants to nudge the participating investors to take action. 

“This really is an important opportunity for Ceretai and all other excellent founders out there – but it’s only if the investors are willing to go beyond applauding female founders, and to actually change the status quo, that this will be a success for all participants. I’m looking forward to seeing the investors invest!”

To attend the event, which is open to everyone, you can register on the following link.

Ceretai is currently working on improving the Diversity Dashboard with new diversity measures for different genders and age groups, covering both statistical representation and qualitative analysis of how people are portrayed. They are also building up a database which will be filled with diversity and equality statistics of popular movies and TV shows, to enable audiences to choose content based on their values. 

About Ceretai

Ceretai offers automated diversity and equality analysis of media and entertainment content. They have collaborated with international brands such as BBC, Forbes, Cannes Film Festival, Norddeutsche Rundfunk (Germany), and Nederlandse Publieke Omroep (The Netherlands). The company has financial support from Vinnova, the Swedish Innovation Agency, and from InnoRampUp, an innovation program from the City of Hamburg.

Through the use of machine learning algorithms, Ceretai extracts diversity data directly from the media files fast and with high accuracy. This reduces the effect of unconscious biases carried by humans, and saves companies a lot of time that is spent on manual counting today. It also allows for a deeper understanding of the produced content, and for corporates to take responsibility for sustainable and diverse content that matches the audiences’ demand on value-based media and entertainment.

Further information about Ceretai and their offers can be found at www.ceretai.com.

About WiSE24

WiSE24 is organised by the leading Silicon Valley-based startup and leadership accelerator for female entrepreneurs, Women’s Startup Lab. Supported by top influencers in the tech industry, they have gathered an active global community of over 20,000 women entrepreneurs, investors, industry experts and supporters since 2013.

The post Ceretai chosen to represent Europe at world’s largest pitch event<span class="badge-status" style="background:#0cbdb4">Presenting on: Wise24</span>  appeared first on Ceretai.

“It’s remarkable that even these short ads confirm the inequality we have seen in almost all our previous analyses – that even if women are seen on screen, it’s the men who get to have a voice.” – Matilda Kong, CEO.  

Read the full blog post here (German).

The post YouTube leaderboard: Diversity analysis of most watched ads during COVID-19<span class="badge-status" style="background:#0cbdb4">Collaboration with: Pinkstinks Germany</span>  appeared first on Ceretai.

Ceretai is the story of two people with a passion for social change, thoughtful use of artificial intelligence, and an act of courage to step outside of the box, who created the first diversity tech start-up and commenced on the journey to transform the media industry.

Matilda Kong and Lisa Hamberg had to meet twice in life to realise what they were capable of doing together. As kids, they attended the same school and played ice hockey together in the six-month-winter country of Sweden, but at some point, their ways had parted.

Before Ceretai was born, Matilda had a career in business development, while Lisa was leading projects as a software developer. However, in fall 2017, things started to shift for them.

As the #metoo campaign was unfolding in Sweden Matilda found herself deeply affected by the stories and wanting to act, but she wasn’t able to do so within the scope of her then employment. So she decided to quit her job.

“I strongly felt that our unawareness of bias and our extreme prejudice towards women and equality were the root problems behind the traumatising events that led up to the campaign,” Matilda says. “And I realised that there must be an arena where my passion for gender equality, my interest in technology, and my education – a combination of technology and business development – could be put together to solve this.”

Matilda had already found it frustratingly hard to find media content that didn’t contain sexism or stereotypical portrayal to some extent for years. As a consumer and audience she was starving for content that applied to her values. Matilda started to investigate if this was a common observation and came to the conclusion that people around her were also craving content that was aligned with their values.

Empowered by these learnings she started to search for people to help her take on the challenge. And that’s when Lisa and Matilda reconnected around the same idea by coincidence. With Matilda’s business sense and Lisa’s technical know-how, they were ready to turn the idea into reality.

Lisa, how did you become a co-founder of Ceretai?

Lisa: By that time I was working as an IT consultant, which I had been doing pretty much since I graduated from high school. I had been quite a career-focused person. But at one point when I was working with yet another consulting project, I realised that whatever I was doing there was not making any difference for anybody. And it didn’t make me any happier how much money I put in my pocket.

As a developer I was moving buttons around on web pages just to increase sales, I was involved in the materialisation and monetisation of a big company. I felt that doing a job that didn’t apply to my values was one of the reasons why I was not happy at that point in life.

When I found myself with this new mindset I went looking for something more value-based, and that’s when I saw a Facebook post from Matilda saying that she was looking for people: maybe co-founders, maybe part-time workers, freelancers… she seemed to be very open to anything. She explained her idea pretty briefly in this post, with only a couple of sentences: “I want to do something by using technology to improve diversity within media content”. It was a short mission line, but I immediately fell for it.

I consume a lot of media content. However, I hadn’t been one of those people who put too much thought into what they watch, as Matilda had, and it was an eye-opener. I realised I could use my knowledge of technology for this great cause.

How long did it take before you had the first product in place?

Matilda: We started working together at the beginning of 2018, and we had the first prototype that summer. Then we pivoted, and instead developed a prototype of a product that is pretty close to what we have today. It took us almost a year to release.

During this process, we came to the conclusion that we need to support the media industry in this transformation towards more diverse content with fewer stereotypes. We realised that even if we had the support of the audience, it was difficult for the media companies to adapt.

Lisa: In the beginning, we had a product that was more directed to consumers, but we realised that if we want to fulfill this mission we have to go directly to the media houses. And even though the actual product changed many times, what stayed untouched is the most important part of our work – our mission to change the media industry.

And even though the actual product changed many times, what stayed untouched is the most important part of our work – our mission to change the media industry.

You released a very successful campaign with BBC last year around gender diversity in the Game of Thrones series. How would you describe this experience?

Lisa: It was extremely encouraging and I still don’t think we know exactly how big of an impact it had. We still hear about it today, and it showed just how much power this type of data has in the news media. We might be aware that women are under-represented, but when we see exactly how little they actually get to speak (in Game of Thrones 75% of the speech was male) this does something with us. I feel that the audience also realised that they need to actively think about what they consume.

Why is the time right now?

Matilda: A window of opportunity has opened. There is more focus on gender equality and other types of diversity than ever, in part thanks to the Me too campaign. However, in terms of technology and how we can use this, the approach is very new and we are truly pioneering the field. We know we are first movers. We know we are doing the right things, but because we are early we need to take a big responsibility in educating the industry.

We know we are first movers. We know we are doing the right things, but because we are early we need to take a big responsibility in educating the industry.

Lisa: It has been proven to us along the way that this is the right time. We have financial support from Hamburg City in Germany and the Swedish innovation agency Vinnova, support that says “this is needed”. It is only a matter of time before initiatives in diversity tech accelerate and legislation on the topic comes.

What is the short term goal that the team strives to achieve right now?

Matilda: Bringing awareness of the necessity to measure! Everyone knows that we have to promote sustainability by measuring CO2 emissions, but we don’t measure diversity. So that is the number one priority: making people and the industry understand the need. And secondly, it’s extremely important that we establish a standard of what exactly to measure in order to break our unconscious biases. It is not enough to simply count how many men or women are represented – we need to go much deeper in what and how to measure to make a genuine impact.

When would you consider your mission completed?

Matilda: When every media company has a diversity partner. When they know that they have to report on diversity, just like they do sustainability reporting. When they know they have to monitor and follow up on the issue. And finally, when all audiences have access to a diverse media landscape and can decide on what to consume based on their personal values.

The post “We want to change the media industry” – Meet the founders of Ceretai appeared first on Ceretai.

Read more about the project, its goals, expected results and plan for implementation.

The post Ceretai receives 2m SEK (180k euros) from Vinnova<span class="badge-status" style="background:#0cbdb4">Granted by: Vinnova</span>  appeared first on Ceretai.

The Oscar’s last month once again reminded us about the fact that only one woman (Kathryn Bigelow) has ever won an Oscar for best director in the Academy Awards’ 92-year history, and that this year there was only one single black actor nominated for an award. But Swedish startup Ceretai, who define themselves as a “diversity tech startup”, think it’s time for a new perspective on the film industry; namely the perspective of the audience – focussing on what is actually shown to us and which immense effect this industry has on our beliefs and behaviours.

“In the bigger perspective, the lack of diversity in media and popular culture hinders the development towards a more equal society”, explains Matilda Kong, CEO and co-founder of Ceretai. “In the Western world we consume around 10 hours of media per day, of course it is going to affect us!”

Ceretai have built a software that can run through any kind of video and uncover some uncomfortable truths about what we are watching. In this study they have complemented their automated machine learning analysis with looking at Bechdel Test scores**, comparing plot summaries on IMDb, and studying movies’ financial success – all with the aim of defining what is actually “the norm”, and if this norm is worth breaking.

“WIFT International are happy to support the work of Ceretai. The data they produce tells us the inconvenient truth which is necessary to create the change we want,” says Helene Granqvist, President of WIFT International.

The first result from the study gives a thorn in the side to the truths about profit maximisation:

• Even though movies are still heavily male dominated both behind and in front of the camera**, no financial benefit of having a male lead actor can be seen when studying the 100 movies with most cinema visits in Sweden 2012-2018. If anything, movies including a female lead outperform those with a male lead in this category of highly successful movies.

“Although this specific dataset is too small to deliver statistical significance, the overall results follow the general trend: lack of equality in the film industry that has no feasible explanation”, says Angnis Schmidt-May, Head of Insights and data scientist at Ceretai.

A result that was however significant, and also historically significant since it has never been done before, was found when analysing another set of 100 movies produced in Sweden between 1970 and 2018. It is something Ceretai call “the smile factor”:

• Women smile on average 2.2 times more than men in movies (referred to as the smile factor).
• There are movies that have a smile factor of up to 7, but only 8% of movies have a smile factor below 1, meaning that men smile more than women.
• A movie has the highest probability of financial success if its smile factor is slightly below the average of 2.2.

“What this last point actually tells us is very interesting; why do we as audiences prefer women to smile twice as much as men?” asks Matilda Kong. “It’s a hen-and-egg question – is it because we are taught to like this from the movies we see, or do we make movies that way because audiences like it? I think it’s both, and the smile factor says something about our unconscious biases as well as our movie-making. We all need to ask ourselves if we are okay with these different expectations on men and women.”

And this also ties to the most interesting result of the study – a never-before revealed correlation between breaking norms and gaining financial success. By looking at the content of these 100 movies and labeling them as normative or norm-breaking according to criteria that can be read in this blog post, Ceretai could determine that in the past five years, the financial success of movies that break norms has increased dramatically. Norm-breaking movies now make up more than half of the top performing movies in Sweden every year.

Schmidt-May: “Again, this is not statistically proven, but it indicates that we are witnessing a great upswing in popularity of movies that break norms and defy stereotypes – something that the film industry has long proclaimed that the audiences do not care about. Also, as a side note, it’s pretty funny that almost a third of the movies from 1970 onward that were labeled as ‘norm-breaking’ are adaptations of Astrid Lindgren books. Imagine what it would look like without her.”

In order to enlarge the dataset and determine the norm more accurately, Ceretai also used IMDb and Bechdel Test data. The complete findings can be seen on their web page, but what could be concluded was that even in movies with a majority of women gender equality is seriously lacking, and that passing the Bechdel test is no guarantee for non-stereotypical portrayal. For example, when analysing 8000 plot summaries on IMDb, the most common keyword used to describe movies where the four main roles are female is “mother”.

Matilda Kong summarises: “The most important finding is that the audiences are ready for a change. They are hungry for more movies questioning our normative world, the traditional narratives and stereotypical portrayal. Even though this is of course not the only factor determining the success of a movie, mapping out and understanding what we are watching is immensely important, and Ceretai is determined to keep spreading this awareness – to the film and TV industries as well as to the audiences”.

Sources:

*Bechdel Test

** Gender distribution in international movies shown in Sweden 2012-2018 (statistics from the Swedish Film Institute)

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International Women’s Day on March 8 often comes with a whole lot of “congratulations!” from people of all genders (although, in my very subjective opinion, it seems that among non-binary people this Freudian slip occurs to a lesser extent than with other genders). 

Among those who do not express a happy “congratulations!”, there is also a small but growing group who don’t consider gender inequalities to exist any more (at least not to the disadvantage of women), particularly in Scandinavia. Some of these instead mutter about the “need for” or “fairness in” having an International Women’s Day at all.

As you can imagine, we at Ceretai believe there is a need for this day. We also believe that a happy “congratulations!” may not be the ideal way of dealing with the results of our recent study that can be found further down in this post. 

In fact, in some feminist communities, saying “congratulations” to a woman on International Women’s Day is comparable to saying the same to a random Christian person on Good Friday. I would like to make an attempt at explaining why.

International Women’s Day was established in 1910 as a strategy to promote equal rights for women. It was founded by female revolutionary activists who fought, among other things, for the right to vote. During the entire 20th century it has been a day of protests, strikes, marches and the like, but in the past decades, it has turned more into a commercialised day of “congratulations” in our part of the world.

We at Ceretai think it should be possible to celebrate women’s achievements while also recognising that we still have a long way to go. We need to keep calling out inequalities and creating awareness around them – whether they are inequalities towards women, men, non-binaries, or any other of the seven grounds of discrimination defined in Swedish law* on which we base all of our data and analyses. 

We do this particularly in the film and TV industries. We recently completed a study of Swedish and international movies from 1970 onward, where we complemented our automated machine learning analysis with looking at Bechdel Test scores**, comparing plot summaries on IMDb, and studying movies’ financial success. 

And like so many times before, the results are unfortunately still disadvantageous towards women.

Results from the study

First, we looked at available statistics from the Swedish Film Institute between 2012 and 2018 (which is when they started collecting gender data on all movies shown in Sweden). Our first conclusions:

• Even though movies are still heavily male dominated both behind and in front of the camera***, no financial benefit of having a male lead actor can be seen when studying the 100 movies (Swedish and international) with most cinema visits in Sweden 2012-2018. 
• If anything, movies including a female lead outperform those with a male lead in this category of highly successful movies.

While this is of course a small dataset, it does tell us that the gut feeling of many within the film industry, that if you want to make a really successful movie you should cast Mr. so-and-so, should not be taken as a truth. 

When looking more closely at the actual content of these movies and their portrayal of men and women, we stumbled upon a very interesting find that we call the smile factor:

• Women smile on average 2.2 times more than men in movies. 
• There are movies that have a smile factor of up to 7, but only 8% of movies have a smile factor below 1, meaning that men smile more than women.
• A movie has the highest probability of financial success if its smile factor is slightly below the average of 2.2.

What this last point actually tells us is very interesting; why do we as audiences prefer women to smile twice as much as men? It’s a hen-and-egg question – is it because we are taught to like this from the movies we see, or do we make movies that way because audiences like it? Personally I think it’s both, and the smile factor says something about our unconscious biases as well as our movie-making. We all need to ask ourselves if we are okay with these different expectations on men and women.

We all need to ask ourselves if we are okay with these different expectations on men and women.

We then looked at 8000 movie plots at IMDb to see what these movies were about and how they were described. 695 of these movies had four men in the four main roles, and 213 had a top-four cast that was all female. Based on keyword analysis of these plots we could conclude that both movies with male dominance and movies with female dominance reinforce stereotypes.

Of course, since these are user-generated descriptions, we can ask ourselves whether this is rather a measure of how stereotypically the clientele of IMDb describes movies rather than how stereotypical the movies actually are. Either way, with IMDb being the world’s largest and most popular movie site, this is a problem.

We then looked at the Bechdel Test scores of these 8000 movies, to see if this could help us distinguish movies that defy stereotypes.

Our conclusion is that also in movies that pass the Bechdel test stereotypical portrayal is very common, and so the Bechdel test is not nearly enough for us to find movies that show true equality.

We have also put a lot of work into defining criteria for movies that break the norm. When comparing these criteria to the financial success of the movies, we actually do see some optimistic results! In the past five years, the financial success of movies that break norms has increased dramatically among the top performing movies in Sweden. From only 15% between 1999-2013, norm-breaking movies now make up more than half of the top performing movies in Sweden every year.

From only 15% between 1999-2013, norm-breaking movies now make up more than half of the top performing movies in Sweden every year.

Something worth mentioning about this part of the analysis is that almost a third of the movies that were labelled as norm-breaking in this dataset (1970-2018) are adaptations of Astrid Lindgren books. We have Pippi Longstocking, Ronia the Robber’s Daughter and the perhaps less internationally known but very loved Lotta on Troublemaker Street. Imagine what the world would have looked like without her!

So to conclude, the most important finding of this study is that the audiences are ready for a change. They are hungry for more movies questioning our normative world, the traditional narratives and stereotypical portrayal. Even though this is of course not the only factor determining the success of a movie, mapping out and understanding what we are watching is immensely important. And until we see real equality and diversity on screen, let’s keep International Women’s Day, but without congratulating women for being born with a vagina.

Because, don’t forget – “better” is great, but “better” doesn’t mean “good enough”.

Footnotes and sources

* The seven grounds of discrimination are: gender, gender identity, sexuality, age, ethnicity, religion, and disability.

** Bechdel Test

*** Gender distribution in international movies shown in Sweden 2012-2018 (statistics from the Swedish Film Institute)

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At Ceretai we love movies. And we love diversity. Our personal utopia is a wide selection of films where all different kinds of stories, characters and perspectives are portrayed. All members of society should have the chance to access movies in which they can recognize part of themselves. Everyone should be able to find screenings out of which they walk empowered by the messages that the movie has sent. Not every movie can do this for everyone – but everyone should always find enough movies that can!

We believe that this is possible – but we are not there yet. In fact, the majority of movie content reinforces stereotypes and norms that have fastened in our society. Ceretai’s goal is to identify movies whose content questions stereotypes and norms – and make this information accessible to the audiences.

To do this, we first must develop a definition for ‘the norm’ in today’s selection of movies. We can then label movie content that challenges or even breaks these norms as ‘norm-breaking’. Of course, norms are very much dependent on the particular society we live in and all of our analyses happen from a Northern-European perspective (for now). It is particularly important to us that the criteria for norms and breaking of norms which come out of our development process will be as objective as possible.

The first basic criteria for movie content that breaks the norm

In order to get a feeling for what could classify as ‘norm-breaking’ film content, we started by reading through hundreds of movie plot summaries. This gave us a first idea on what type of stories appear often and which narratives could be considered as exceptions to these norms.

Based on these initial insights, we set up a first list of criteria, taking our very first step towards identifying norm-breaking movies. The phrasing of these criteria is based on the grounds for discrimination, as defined in Swedish law.

A movie is labelled as ‘norm-breaking’ if it satisfies at least one of the following demands:

1. In the centre of the story is a female character and the movie does not focus on her relation to men nor on her role as a mother.
   (Example: Pippi Långstrump directed by Olle Hellbom)
2. In the centre of the story is a male character who struggles with masculinity or with his role as a man in society.
   (Example: Billie Elliot directed by Stephen Daldry)
3. In the centre of the story is a character from the LGBTQIA+ community.
   (Example: The Danish Girl directed by Tom Hooper)
4. In the centre of the story is a character who is of non-white ethnicity or who is portrayed by a person of color.
   (Example: Black Panther directed by Ryan Coogler)
5. In the centre of the story is a character belonging to a religious group other than Christian or atheist.
   (Example: My name is Khan directed by Karan Johar)
6. In the centre of the story is a person who is older than 45 years.
   (Example: Hundraåringen directed by Felix Herngren)
7. In the centre of the story is a character who is disabled or who is portrayed by a person with a disability.
   (Example: Les Intouchables directed by Olivier Nakache, Eric Toledano)

Using these very basic criteria, we have manually labelled more than 1000 international and Swedish cinema movies and found that about 25% of all films classified as ’norm-breaking’ according to our basic definition. Consequently, we consider the remaining 75% that do not satisfy any of the criteria as ‘the norm’.

What we have also found is that the amount of norm-breaking film content has increased from 15% to 56% among the 5 best performing movies in Sweden during the last 20 years. This is a first indication that movies that break norms and defy stereotypes are becoming more popular among the audiences!

The next steps – refining the criteria and making norm-breaking movies available to the audiences

You may have noticed that our above notion of ‘breaking the norm’ is still pretty fluffy. We need to improve it and define more precise criteria. And we can do this by using a magic tool called science – but first we need to collect lots of data…

We want to go even deeper into the on-screen content of the movie and into the portrayal of characters. We want to detect imbalances that are sometimes hard to see for the potentially biased human eye. And our software tools based on machine learning will help us with this. They will also act as our data deliverers – you can think of them as robots who do the boring work for us and don’t have a personal opinion about any of the movies.

The data delivered by our software tools will be used to fill a huge database, similar to IMDb but with additional information on diversity, equality and breaking the norm in the movie content.

This data will enable a larger audience to find the movies they want to see more often!

But how? I want more detail…

So our aim is to obtain a more precise and refined version of norm-breaking film content, in addition to the above basic criteria. We also need to perform the analyses in an automated way instead of having to do time-consuming manual work. Our methodology will therefore be based on the scientific evaluation of a large set of movie data.

But let’s take this step by step.

1). The diversity parameters

For each movie, we define various diversity parameters, such as:

• the screen times devoted to women, people older than 45 and persons of color
• the speaking time of women
• imbalances among genders in emotions / facial expressions (e.g. the ’smile factor’ = how much more do women smile on screen than men do?)
• imbalances among genders in filming angles (e.g. how often are people filmed from below/above to appear dominant/subdominant?)
• imbalances among genders in content of dialogues (e.g. which type of frequent words are used by men and women?)
• the appearance of LGBTQIA+ characters, disabled people and members of other underrepresented groups of society

2). The statistical evaluation

Next, we determine ‘the norm’ for these parameters by finding their average values over a large set of movies. In case this norm suggests an imbalance (for example, an average of less than 50% speaking time for women), there will be a well-defined ‘direction of equality’ (in this example: more female speaking time). Movies whose diversity parameter significantly deviates* from the norm in the ‘direction of equality’ will be labelled norm-breaking in regard to this particular diversity parameter.

Let’s give you a more detailed example.

Suppose that by analysing 2000+ movies we find that – on average – women smile twice as much as men in these films. We call this parameter the ‘smile-factor’ whose average value would be 2 in this example. The ‘direction of equality’ points to values for the smile-factor that are smaller than 2, because full equality would correspond to a value of 1 (for which women and men smile equally often). So a movie with smile factor 1.5 lies in the ‘direction of equality’.

Now, whether this movie is labelled to have a norm-breaking smile factor depends on the whole data set: Only if its value of 1.5 lies outside the ‘standard deviation’ around the average, we define it to be norm-breaking. Because in this case we can say with confidence that it truly differs from the average and is not just a statistical fluke. For instance, if the standard deviation for the smile factor turns out to be 0.2 in our data set, then any value smaller than 1.8 would significantly differ from the average value of 2.

Notice that the value of 1.5 in our example (which states that women smile 50% more than men) still does not correspond to full equality. But it is sufficiently far away from the average movie to be considered as norm-breaking, according to our new definition!

* Significant deviation is a well-defined concept in data science and requires the parameter value under consideration to differ from the average more than by an amount called the ’standard deviation’. Just like the average, this number is computed from the entire data set of all movies. The standard deviation is very relevant because it tells you whether you have enough data to make statistical claims (such as “the female speaking time of movie XYZ is 55%, which is significantly higher than that of most other movies”). It is crucial for objectivity!

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Ceretai has been selected to receive the InnoRampUp grant of €150,000 from the city of Hamburg. The grant is handed out by IFB Innovationsstarter who supports technologically innovative startups.

“We are very proud to receive this grant from IFB Innovationsstarter. It proves to us that the interest for our technology and our business model is big in Germany, and that business experts believe in our product and our team.” says Matilda Kong, co-founder and CEO.

The grant will enable the development of the company’s Diversity Dashboard that will be offered on a subscription basis. With this software, Ceretai aims to change the media industry and what the processes look like for measuring and monitoring diversity in media content.

About InnoRampUp

InnoRampUp is a funding program implemented by IFB Innovationstarter as a subsidiary of the Hamburgische Investitions- und Förderbank. The program aims to strengthen the local startup scene and development of promising companies by supporting technologically innovative startups in Hamburg. Since the launch of the InnoRampUp program, over 80 projects have received funding. Prerequisites for startups to receive the grant are a business idea with a realistic chance for economical success, a convincing startup team and to meet the criteria for a small business (less than 50 people and annual turnover or total assets <€ 10 million).

The post Ceretai receives InnoRampUp grant from the city of Hamburg<span class="badge-status" style="background:#0cbdb4">Granted by: IFB innovationsstarter</span>  appeared first on Ceretai.