This post will cover the data I collected in class last week while watching the pilot episode of Supergirl.

The collected data

Up until the last 8 minutes of the episodes, I recorded the name of every character who spoke in the order in which they spoke. Afterwards, I went back and coded each speaker as either male or female (or “both” in a couple of instances in which the “speaker” was a crowd of people.). The few instances in which I couldn’t remember the speaker’s gender were annotated with question marks.

A few notes on the data:

• In some cases, you’ll see that the same name is recorded more than once, consecutively. This is due to one of two reasons. Either (a) the person paused for a considerable length (more than a few seconds) or (b) one scene ended and another began with the same character speaking.

• The data go up until the point where Kara/Supergirl is speaking with the holographic projection of her mother.

• Instances in which Kara Zor-El was dressed in her superhero costume but was conversing with people who knew her true identity were recorded as Kara Zor-El as speaking.

A brief analysis

The breakdown of total utterances by gender is as follows:

• Female = 119
• Male = 78
• Both = 2
• Don’t remember = 2

It appears that females have >60% of all speaking roles. Comparing this to some of the extant data on utterances in film and television by gender, it’s clear that the 3:2 ratio of female to male utterances is much higher than the average.