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)

The post Turning the spotlight on norms – and the success story of movies that break them<span class="badge-status" style="background:#0cbdb4">Press Release by: Ceretai</span>  appeared first on Ceretai.

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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*Vinnova is Sweden’s innovation authority.

The post Can the film industry become more equal and inclusive by analyzing the impact of norms on the industry’s business models?<span class="badge-status" style="background:#0cbdb4">Press release by: Vinnova</span>  appeared first on Ceretai.