This week in Digital Humanities class we measured the speaking time for female characters, in comparison to male characters for the show Supergirl. Since we determined that everyone timing everything at once was too difficult (after crashing and burning within 20 seconds of the show starting) we broke the task up into parts. Some of my classmates were assigned the task of recording male speaking times, others were assigned the task of recording female speaking times. I personally, decided to take down the names of all of the characters with speaking roles.

*Supergirl Speaking Roles:*
Kara Zor El(Danvers)/ Supergirl
Superman/Kalel
The Danvers
Alex Danver
Cat Grant
James Olson
Rick  (news guy)
Alora Zarel
Hank Henshaw
(***For my data, I decided to record characters with **super** alter egos as one character,   because I felt that recording them as separate characters caused unnecessary confusion. My reasoning for this is that I believe they are the same person with the same feelings, but just identifying differently in different situations.)

Initially, I was not impressed by my findings. Based off of my data, it can be seen that the amount of female characters is about equal to male characters. I felt that any show that is supposed to be “female friendly” should have marginally more female characters than male. After comparing this with the data my classmates collected, I got a better picture and my opinion began to change. The male gender-timer that my classmates took revealed that male characters only spoke for about 18 minutes of the 45 minute show. This is remarkable compared to many other popular television shows and movies.

It could be argued, that since this show is not a show that is equally about both genders, but one that is directly concerning a female character who is most likely affecting the gender timer results with her lines alone. This would be a valid argument, but even in comparison with other movies and shows with “strong female lead”, this show is still well above the others. In The Polygraph Film Analysis, (http://polygraph.cool/films/) conducted by Hannah Anderson and Matt Daniels, it has been shown that just because a movie or show has a female character as the main character, it does not always mean that speaking times will reflect this. Mulan was shown to have 75% male dialogue, The Little Mermaid had 70%, and Frozen had 50%. These are three movies (marketed to little girls) where the main characters are women, but they speak a very small amount of the time. This shows that a female lead role is not a surefire measure of how “female-friendly” a show or movie is. Scrolling further down on The Polygraph Film Analysis site, in the analysis of 2,000 screenplays, it can be seen that a ridiculous amount of movies (SUCCESSFUL AND POPULAR MOVIES) had a ridiculously low amount of female speaking characters. Some box-office hits even got by with having women speak 0% of the time. On the other end of the spectrum, the shows with a larger percent of females speaking are very few, and many of them are movies I have never even heard of.This shows that movies with larger female dialogue are made less often, and appear to receive less attention. Through this we can see that media like Supergirl is few and far between.

Through this exploration, I was able to see that shows and movies like Supergirl are rare. A female main character can be a deceiving way to make a show look like it is “female-friendly.” For years the film industry has been getting away with constructing situations, plots, and universes where women speaking is not required to drive the story along. This is something we need to stop overlooking, we need to see it for what it really is, a plot hole.

Sources: Polygraph Film Analysis (http://polygraph.cool/films/)