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

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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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