Google Gives $1.2M to Study Female Roles in Media

Google gave a $1.2 million grant to study female roles in television and film.

The tech titan gave $1.2 million to the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media to create software that will enable the organization to tally and analyze female roles in children's programming and films, according to Wired. Children's media is the place where there's the most significant gender inequality according to the institute. The software will scan programming and films to quantify female representation.

(Google also gave out another $23 million in the Global Impact Awards to nonprofits that do things such as create clean water, barcode the DNA of endangered wildlife and bring more STEM education into schools.)

The institute would like to have outside developers work on the software while researchers from the University of Southern California work on the analytical side of reports, executive director Madeline Di Nonno told Wired. She hopes the software will be completed in the next year .

“If we’re able to have a software tool, that means we’re able to speed up a manual, and time-intensive process of assessment and data collection,” Di Nonno said. “Why we think this is important is because that only by having the facts can we put a spotlight on how females are portrayed.”

While there are several high-grossing, female-driven films such as "The Hunger Games" and the "Twilight" films, depictions of women and girls are still relatively low. One only has to watch the sitcoms "Guys With Kids" or "Two and a Half Men" to see that women are lacking top billing.