How Long Is an Actress Onscreen? A New Tool Finds the Answer Faster.

The effort to catalog the inequity in onscreen roles for women and minorities has a new weapon. The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, at Mount St. Mary’s University, with financial backing from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic division, will announce on Wednesday a tool that employs video- and audio-recognition technology, along with algorithms, to identify gender, speaking time and additional details about characters presented in films, television shows and other media. The software, called the Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient (or GD-IQ), will speed up and automate the painstaking data-collection process that researchers use to study representation, a key initiative in recent years as the entertainment industry has begun to focus on equity onscreen. Read More…