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 Saint 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.

“The research is a tool to help inspire change,” said Madeline Di Nonno, chief executive of the Geena Davis Institute. “It’s not meant to criticize; it’s meant to have the facts so that content creators can be aware and learn from it.”

The software took engineers from the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory at the University of Southern California and Google two years to develop. Dr. Shri Narayanan, an engineering professor at the university, led the development team there, with input from social scientists and Dr. Caroline Heldman, a professor of politics at Occidental College, along with Hartwig Adam, a Google machine-learning research specialist. “We wanted to see how we can unleash data science, for tools of discovery,” Dr. Narayanan said.