Someone calculated how much female characters speak on “The Simpsons” and the results are infuriating
Someone calculated how much female characters speak on “The Simpsons” and the results are infuriating
We love The Simpsons. It’s easily one of the most hilarious and groundbreaking television shows ever created. But ever since we’ve heard the results of a developer who studied how evenly the genders speak on the show, we’re having a hard time keeping our cool.
After pulling scripts over the past 27 years from Simpsons World, developer Todd W. Schneider found that the differences in the amount of dialogue between the genders is dramatic.
In a blog post published on his site, he breaks down his exact findings in helpful (if infuriating) visual charts.
He writes, “Women account for 25% of the dialogue on The Simpsons, including Marge and Lisa, two of the show’s main characters.”
Only a quarter of the dialogue on the show comes from women? As if that weren’t already bad, the news gets even worse. It turns out, the number of supporting characters in the show that are women is extremely limited. Only five out of the top fifty supporting characters are females. Which, of course, means that there’s an insanely small amount of female dialogue once Marge and Lisa are taken out of the equation.
He explains further that, “If we remove the Simpson nuclear family, things look even more lopsided: women account for less than 10% of the supporting cast’s dialogue.”
This, of course, doesn’t account for all the things that Maggie says without ever using her words… but it’s still a crazy low number that we are not okay with.
Schneider also notes that there’s a gender imbalance in the top writers for the show. In fact, nine out of ten of them are male.
He added that it’d be interesting to see if the scripts written by women had more gender balance in the dialogue, though he didn’t crunch those numbers himself. While there’s a lot of other fascinating material he aggregated about the iconic show, we are having a hard time with this obvious gender imbalance in a show that has been so influential over the years.
The Simpsons has always been good about keeping up with the times. So, hopefully now that they see these numbers, they’ll start to make some changes.
h/t Mashable
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