“What do you think is so bad about girl? I’m a girl, and your boss, and powerful, and rich, and hot, and smart.”
–Cat, Supergirl Pilot (2015)

The above quote is proclaimed by Cat Grant the CEO of CatCo Worldwide media. In the quote, she asserts the dominance of women or “girls” by using her highly renowned reputation and boastful attitude to set an example of why being a girl is not so “bad”. This blog will discuss the in-class analysis of the dialogue composition of Supergirl. Obviously, with a title of Supergirl, it is predicted that women will have a more highlighted presence in the film, but do they really? Are most verbal interactions done by women? Here we see it through, literally.

Last week, our class measured the amount of dialogue for a specific gender or character in the pilot episode of Supergirl. The class was divided into groups, with each having a different objective. Several groups had an objective of timing how long a specific main character talked by using Microsoft excel and utilizing the timestamp tool. Two groups separated to time men or women, exclusively. I joined the group responsible for timing men. We used the “Kichisaga Leadership” made app, GenderTimer, to keep track of the amount of time men and women talked within the episode.

Using GenderTimer took some time to get used to, as it was more difficult than anticipated to keep track of which gender talked within the moment. During the beginning of the episode, it proved that starting and stopping your specific gender timer was no easy task, as we had to restart just after 30 seconds of watching, due to the sudden difficulty we experienced right at the start. Eventually, the GenderTimer groups got used to the rhythm of timing, although I couldn’t imagine how much more laborious it was for the timestamp groups, as they had to keep track of start and end times for character dialogue.

Unfortunately, our class time did not permit finishing the entire episode, so it was cut short to around 35 minutes. The data I collected for men are as follows:

Total Speaking Time For Men (Recorded) - 16:22

Total Speaking Time For Women (Calculated) - 18:30

Gender Interaction Changes- 35

Total Time Recorded- 34:52

According to my data, men speak about 47% of the time, which is surprisingly higher than I would expect for a TV show that features a female main character. Although, I cannot make any assumptions about which gender dominates the plot and personality of this TV show (Despite it being titled “Supergirl”), it is apparent in my data that the speaking time percentages between men and women are almost equal (47% and 53%, respectively). Therefore, in conclusion, women are marginally more dominant than men in the realm of dialogue composition, as they speak slightly longer than men.