Measuring Gender Representation in Animated Films
arXiv:2608.21429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Animated films--often developed with an audience of children in mind--are an important vector for enculturation, and empirical work that has examined the representation of gender at scale in these films has largely focused on counting the gender composition of the cast rather than deploying a more fine-grained instrument (such as assessing the visibility of those characters in overall screentime). In this work, we develop a computational pipeline for recognizing animated characters in these films, and use it to test several hypotheses about gender representation in a corpus of 224 popular animated movies. We find that while the overall representation of female characters in animated films largely tracks with those of live-action films (over the period 1980-2025), we see stark differences between the representation of human characters (much greater representation among women and girls) and non-humans (largely male). Contrary to past work on Disney, we do not see female characters declining in antagonist roles in animated films, and characters who are women and girls are much more likely to share scenes together than their live action contemporaneous counterparts.
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[Submitted on 17 Aug 2026]
Title:Measuring Gender Representation in Animated Films
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Abstract:Animated films--often developed with an audience of children in mind--are an important vector for enculturation, and empirical work that has examined the representation of gender at scale in these films has largely focused on counting the gender composition of the cast rather than deploying a more fine-grained instrument (such as assessing the visibility of those characters in overall screentime). In this work, we develop a computational pipeline for recognizing animated characters in these films, and use it to test several hypotheses about gender representation in a corpus of 224 popular animated movies. We find that while the overall representation of female characters in animated films largely tracks with those of live-action films (over the period 1980-2025), we see stark differences between the representation of human characters (much greater representation among women and girls) and non-humans (largely male). Contrary to past work on Disney, we do not see female characters declining in antagonist roles in animated films, and characters who are women and girls are much more likely to share scenes together than their live action contemporaneous counterparts.
Subjects:
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.21429 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2608.21429v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.21429
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history
From: David Bamman [view email] [v1] Mon, 17 Aug 2026 01:38:34 UTC (26,347 KB)
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