Google funds research tool for gender role analysis in TV, films

Google granted $1.2 million to a nonprofit organization to help with gender stereotyping research in the media on Thursday, according to Google's website for its own Global Impact Awards. The money will go toward developing a tool that will automate the process of identifying women and their actions in hundreds of hours of video.

The Geena Davis Institute, the recipient of the grant, was established to conduct studies on the representation of women in the media, including movies and both primetime and children’s TV shows. According to Wired, a recent study done on 129 films and 311 TV shows by the institute showed that 28 percent of women in films were female, fewer women in TV and films are employed in science and technology jobs than the national average, and 28.3 percent of women in family films were identified as wearing “sexy” attire.

With Google’s grant, the institute will reach out to developers to automate the collection of data, designating how women fit into fictional and non-fictional worlds. The institute has not made clear how it hopes to identify women and further establish their marginalization through that automation process (presumably that’s mostly for the developers to figure out), but we imagine a combination of audio and visual analysis that check for a number of typical female identifiers would do the trick.