Women on screens 

A recent UNESCO study took its
title from a sentence that Apple’s female-gendered voice-assistant,
Siri, was originally programmed to say in response to users calling
her a sexist name: “entitled “I’d Blush If I Could.” Apple finally
updated Siri’s programming only at the beginning of 2019 to “I
don’t know how to respond to that.” ^[1]

In light of the fact that Siri was released back in 2011,
it seemed to not have bothered Apple much at all that it was
assigning Siri such a coy, stereotypically feminine response that
it was allowed to stay in the program for close to eight
years. As the UNESCO report points out, ”Siri’s
‘female’ obsequiousness — and the servility expressed by so many
other digital assistants projected as young women — provides a
powerful illustration of gender biases coded into technology
products.”

Such biases have not only plagued the technology sector,
but the entertainment industry, as well. Of
course, AI does not create bias, but it does reflect
the prejudices of its programming. Now, though AI is being used to counter bias^[2].

Women on screens 

Concern about the message about women’s roles that come
through from how women appear or often fail to appear in films and
television is what motivates the nonprofit work of the
Geena Davis Institute on Gender in
Media. Its tagline is: “If she can see it, she can
be it.”^[3]

There is a great deal of truth to that assertion about
seeing the possibilities. As the study Women in Tech: Their Current Status,
What They Have Achieved and What They Want^[4] shows, the
lack of visibility of women in tech, particularly in leadership
roles and as speaker in conferences, is very discouraging for
women, and the majority reported that they would be more likely to
attend a conference if a women were featured. 

Introducing an AI-powered spellcheck for
bias 

Geena Davis, the actress for whom the organization is
named, is a devoted activist for women’s representation on the
screen. Appropriately enough, she announced the adoption of an AI
solution for bias in films by Disney named for her ideals,
the Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient (GD-IQ)
or GD-IQ: Spellcheck for
Bias.  ^[5]

As reported in The Hollywood Reporter^[6], Davis
delivered the keynote speech this month at the Power of Inclusion
Summit that was held in New Zealand during which
she announced that her organization is teaming up with
Walt Disney Studios to apply the AI solution that shares her name
to identify possible biases in film and television scripts. 
The article explains:^[7]

The new tool leverages patented machine learning
technology developed at the University of Southern California
Viterbi School of Engineering to rapidly analyze the text of a
script to determine its number of male and female characters and
whether they are representative of the real population at large.
The technology also can discern the numbers of characters who are
people of color, LGBTQI, possess disabilities or belong to other
groups typically underrepresented and failed by Hollywood
storytelling.

In addition to counting up the representation of genders
and races or ethnic identities of characters in a script, the tool
can break down the quality of the representation in terms of the
dialogue, including total number of words and the
“level of sophistication of the vocabulary they use.” It also
assesses “the relative social status or positions of power assigned
to the characters by group.”

Davis said that her organization will be working with
Disney for a “year using this tool to help their
decision-making, identify opportunities to increase diversity and
inclusion in the manuscripts that they receive.” 

It’s interesting that Disney is doing this now, as it has
come under fire in the past for depicting negative sexist and
racist stereotypes in its animated films. See the videos
below:

  

 

Disney has changed its story lines and script to get more
in tune with modern sensibilities in recent years. That’s how we
were able to go from the first princess Snow White, who is not only
domesticity incarnate but the “fairest of them all,” to the
Polynesian princess Moana, who leaves her home not to flee for her
life but to save her people as their ruler.

There were many other princesses in between that allowed
Disney to showcase Native Americans, Asians, African-Americans,
etc., as well as princesses who didn’t just end married and living
happily, as in the case of
Brave. There are also a whole slew of
Disney remakes of its animated films with live actors, which is
giving the famed studio a chance to not just update the look of a
film but to bring it into the more modern age with respect to the
representation of race and sex.

But there still have been quite a few slip ups along the
way even in the films intended to be a lot more progressive than
its predecessors. 

The galaxy may be far, far away, but the film was not a
long time ago

One striking example of surprisingly persistent sexism in
the Disney universe is the
2016 Star Wars
film Rogue One. Sure,
there’s a female hero at the center of the film rather than a young
man trying to find himself and come into his destiny by tapping
into the power of the Force. There were even some women fliers
among the rebels.

But did you notice something? Every single one of the
scientists and engineers appearing in the movie was a
man.  

The protagonist’s father was the chief scientist leading a
team of male engineers. Even if Disney was not yet ready to allow
our heroine’s mother to be the scientist (so I don’t know why not)
the producers could have at least included some women among the
engineering group. But they didn’t, and that obvious oversight
is something that should make the producers at Disney
blush.

So if the new AI tool catches what is obvious to anyone
who is aware that roles do not have to be gendered and that you
don’t get away with assuming all engineers and scientists are men
just because you created a strong female lead, that would be a good
thing for film.