A new study has ranked the Star Wars films by the amount of time given to female characters – and the original 1977 movie is at the bottom of the pile.

According to Glasgow University lecturer Dr Rebecca Harrison, in Episode IV: A New Hope, women (a category which here includes female robots and aliens) get just 15 per cent of the film's screentime.

Explaining how she arrived at the figures in a blog post, Harrison said that non-speaking characters were not included, and that the definition of "women’s screen time" excluded scenes in which women appear in the background while men talk, or in a purely passive role as a "visual object".

This had a particular impact on the prequel trilogy, in which Natalie Portman's character Padmé – the mother of Luke Skywalker – is "quite often just kind of ‘there.' She really does get a rough deal," according to Harrison.

Droids were treated as male or female characters, as R2-D2 and C-3PO are consistently referred to as "he", while characters use "she" to refer to L3-37, a robot voiced by Fleabag star Phoebe Waller-Bridge in new prequel film Solo.