Google Tests A Software That Judges Hollywood's Portrayal of Women

Slashdot reader theodp writes: Aside from it being hosted in a town without a movie theater, the 2016 Bentonville Film Festival was also unusual in that it required all entrants to submit "film scripts and downloadable versions of the film" for judgment by "the team at Google and USC", apparently part of a larger Google-funded research project with USC Engineering "to develop a computer science tool that could quickly and efficiently assess how women are represented in films"...

Fest reports noted that representatives of Google and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy appeared in a "Reel vs. Real Diversity" panel presentation at the fest, where the importance of diversity and science to President Obama were discussed, and the lack of qualified people to fill 500,000 U.S. tech jobs was blamed in part on how STEM careers have been presented in film and television... In a 2015 report on a Google-sponsored USC Viterbi School of Engineering MacGyver-themed event to promote women in engineering, USC reported that President Obama was kept briefed on efforts to challenge media's stereotypical portrayals of women. As for its own track record, Google recently updated its Diversity page, boasting that "21% of new hires in 2015 were women in tech, compared to 19% of our current population"....

Comments

Algorithm leaked

[Time_Ngler]

The only acceptable algorithm the program could give would be:

10 PRINT "THIS SCRIPT PORTRAYS WOMEN POORLY."
20 GOTO 10

How women are portrayed in movies

[penguinoid]

More beautiful than average, and more extreme in one trait or another.

Re:Morons

[quantaman]

Why do people think things like the Bechdel test are worth more than a fart in the breeze/

Because you think the Bechdel test is a poor measure of female portrayal in movies, or because you don't think having substantial female characters is important?

More hyper-liberal stupidity

[Sqreater]

Of course, let's have history-changing, gender-leveling gender-pandering required in every movie, just like in "Halt and Catch Fire". We CAN propagandize our way toward filling those 500,000 tech jobs. We just have to lie about reality strongly enough and long enough to change it to suit us.

Bechdel Test

[_KiTA_]

All this talk about the Bechdel test reminds me of the Galbrush Paradox, a related mess that was codified during GamerGate. During a discussion of noted con artist Anita Sarkeesian -- who has managed to run TWO wildly successful Kickstarter scams stealing close to half a million dollars from rubes -- and her completely unobtainable standards for female characters:

Absolutely not. If you can't tell a two bit con artist from one of your own, you really need to clean up your movement before you start 'suggesting' anything.

But maybe you're just naive and don't understand the problem. Do you know why there's so many white male characters in video games? Especially leads? Because no one cares about them.

A white male can be a lecherous drunk. A woman can't or it's sexist. Sexualizing women and what all. A white male can be a mentally disturbed soldier who's mind is unraveling as he walks through the hell of the modern battleeld. A woman can't or you're victimizing women and saying they're all crazy.

Consider Guybrush Threepwood, start of the Monkey Island series. He's weak, socially awkward, cowardly, kind of a nerd and generally the last person you'd think of to even cabin boy on a pirate ship, let alone captain one. He is abused, verbally and physically, mistreated, shunned, hated and generally made to feel unwanted.

Now let's say Guybrush was a girl. We'll call her Galbrush. Galbrush is weak, socially awkward, cowardly, kind of a nerd and generally the last person you'd think of to even cabin boy on a pirate ship, let alone captain one. She is abused, verbally and physically, mistreated, shunned, hated and generally made to feel unwanted.

Now, you might notice that I've given the exact same description to both of these characters. But here's where things deviate. While no one cares if Guybrush takes a pounding for being, for lack of a better term, less than ideal pirate, Galbrush will be presumed to be discriminated against because of her gender. In fact, every hardship she will endure, though exactly the same as the hardships Guybrush endured, will be considered misogyny, rather than someone being ill suited to their desired calling.

And that ending. She goes through ALL that trouble to help, let's call him Eli Marley, escape the evil clutches of the ghost piratess Le Chuck, it turns out he didn't even need her help and she even screwed up his plan to thwart Le Chuck. Why, it'd be a slap in the face to every woman who's ever picked up a controller. Not only is the protagonist inept, but apparently women make lousy villains too!

And that's why Guybrush exists and Galbrush doesn't. Men can be comically inept halfwits. Women can't. Men can be flawed, tragic human beings. Women can't. And why? Because every single female character reects all women everywhere.

The horrible truth ls you and Sarkeesian want to craft a box into which you can force every female character into. Some idiotic 'ideal'. Putting aside the stupidity of exchanging one unobtainable role model for women with another, this has the added problem of making all female characters exactly the same. And when all characters are exactly the same, that's boring And boring characters do not sell video games.

And when applied to film, this is why the Bechdel test fails. Because writing female characters is an identity politics minefield, and trying to give them any character development other than talking about the characters you ARE allowed to take risks with or write as less than perfect gets you in trouble with idiots writing for The Mary Sue or Jezebel, who then rile up a lynch mob at you.

Re:Bechdel Test

[serviscope_minor]

She made some "tropes vs women" videos. Then had a kickstarter to make "Trops vs Women in videogames" initially promising 5 videos of length 10-20 minutes. After receiving $160,000 instead of the requested $6000, she bumped it up to 12 videos, of which she has made 14 of a longer length than promised and it appears that production is still continuing so there will likely be more.

But anyway because you consider yourself a rationalist, I invite you to back up your assertion. Provide evidence. And I don't mean random partisan blog posts. You can see the kickstarter page. I bet the wayback machine has older copies too.

If there's actual real evidence, not wishful thinking from the blogosphere, you can find it.

You have made the claim of fraud, it is up to you to back up that claim with evidence.

I don't however expect you to trouble yourself with such trivial matters of backing up allegations. I expect you to change tack or move the goalposts and start complaining about something else she did (e.g. having an opinion you dislike on the games themselves), leaving your unfounded claim of fraud just dangling there in the breeze.

Re: Morons

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure.

Put away your clipboard and stop running a tally on dicks vs vaginas, and what color they are.

If women want roles of substance, they will pay for those movies and capitalism will make it happen. To date they haven't, because it isn't what they actually want, so stop trying to force your fucking agenda down everyone's throats.

Don't watch movies you don't like. The end. Fuck off.

Re: Morons

[Anonymous Coward]

How about some male stereotype tests? Does this movie contain:

A male action hero who isn't good looking?
A male nerd who is good at talking to girls?
A fat guy who isn't the comic relief?
A cop who is happily married?
A gay action hero?
An asian guy who is a stud and doesn't know martial arts?

Interesting to quantify if possible

[joe_frisch]

It would be very interesting to find a way to quantify bias in media. I don't know if its possible, but it sounds hard. OTOH, self-driving cars sounded hard as well and they seem to be becoming a reality.

Last time I posted a req for a high level RF engineer, I got ~100 applications from men and 2 from women. If only for selfish reasons I'd like more women learning the skills that I need.

I've been working in a high tech field for a quarter century now and I do see a problem the way women are treated in many places. The problems are not universal, and there is a lot of variety, but it exists. It difficult to separate cause and effect but more information would be helpful.