In April 2016, we broke down film dialogue by gender. The essay presented an imbalance in which men delivered more lines than women across 2,000 screenplays. But quantity of lines is only part of the story. What characters do matters, too.

Gender tropes (e.g., women are pretty/men act, men don’t cry) are just as important as dialogue in understanding how men and women are portrayed on-screen. These stereotypes result from many components, including casting, acting, directing, etc.

The film script, arguably, is ground zero—the source material by which everyone is influenced. And in film scripts, there’s dialogue and screen direction. For example, let’s take this iconic scene from Titanic:

Dialogue Screen Direction Rose gasps. There is nothing in her field of vision but water...She leans forward, arching her back. He puts his hands on her waist to steady her. Rose closes her eyes...she smiles dreamily, then leans back, gently pressing her back against his chest. He pushes forward slightly against her.

The curious data here is less what Rose says (“I’m flying”) and more what the screen direction prescribes (“she smiles dreamily,” “he pushes against her”). In the following analysis, we go deep on screen direction to understand gender tropes. We examined 2,000 scripts and broke down every screen direction mapped to the pronouns “she” and “he.”