IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0225385.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Cinderella Complex: Word embeddings reveal gender stereotypes in movies and books

Author

Listed:
  • Huimin Xu
  • Zhang Zhang
  • Lingfei Wu
  • Cheng-Jun Wang

Abstract

Our analysis of thousands of movies and books reveals how these cultural products weave stereotypical gender roles into morality tales and perpetuate gender inequality through storytelling. Using the word embedding techniques, we reveal the constructed emotional dependency of female characters on male characters in stories. We call this narrative structure “Cinderella complex”, which assumes that women depend on men in the pursuit of a happy, fulfilling life. Our analysis covers a substantial portion of narratives that shape the modern collective memory, including 7,226 books, 6,087 movie synopses, and 1,109 movie scripts. The “Cinderella complex” is observed to exist widely across periods and contexts, reminding how gender stereotypes are deeply rooted in our society. Our analysis of the words surrounding female and male characters shows that the lives of males are adventure-oriented, whereas the lives of females are romantic-relationship oriented. Finally, we demonstrate the social endorsement of gender stereotypes by showing that gender-stereotypical movies are voted more frequently and rated higher.

Suggested Citation

  • Huimin Xu & Zhang Zhang & Lingfei Wu & Cheng-Jun Wang, 2019. "The Cinderella Complex: Word embeddings reveal gender stereotypes in movies and books," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(11), pages 1-18, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0225385
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0225385
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0225385
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0225385&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0225385?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. repec:nas:journl:v:115:y:2018:p:e3635-e3644 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Cristian Candia & C. Jara-Figueroa & Carlos Rodriguez-Sickert & Albert-László Barabási & César A. Hidalgo, 2019. "The universal decay of collective memory and attention," Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, vol. 3(1), pages 82-91, January.
    3. Ayanna K. Thomas & Peter R. Millar, 2012. "Reducing the Framing Effect in Older and Younger Adults by Encouraging Analytic Processing," The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, The Gerontological Society of America, vol. 67(2), pages 139-149.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Rebecca D. Frank, 2021. "Cinderella's stick: A fairy tale for digital preservation. Yiannis Tzitzikas, Yiannis Marketakis. Berlin: Springer, 2018, 249 pp., € 51.16 (paperback). (ISBN 9783319984872)," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 72(5), pages 649-652, May.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Andrea Lippi & Laura Barbieri & Mariacristina Piva & Werner De Bondt, 2018. "Time-varying risk behavior and prior investment outcomes: Evidence from Italy," Judgment and Decision Making, Society for Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 13(5), pages 471-483, September.
    2. Zhenpeng Li & Xijin Tang & Zhenjie Hong, 2022. "Collective attention dynamic induced by novelty decay," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 95(8), pages 1-11, August.
    3. Nie, Wei-Peng & Cai, Shi-Min & Zhao, Zhi-Dan & Zhou, Tao, 2022. "Revealing mobility pattern of taxi movements with its travel trajectory," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 598(C).
    4. Cunico, Giovanni & Aivazidou, Eirini & Mollona, Edoardo, 2021. "Building a dynamic theory of citizens’ awareness of European Cohesion Policy interventions," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 289(2), pages 758-773.
    5. Timur Gareev & Irina Peker, 2023. "Quantity versus quality in publication activity: knowledge production at the regional level," Papers 2311.08830, arXiv.org.
    6. Michaela Wrede & Tobias Dauth, 2020. "A temporal perspective on the relationship between top management team internationalization and firms' innovativeness," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 41(4), pages 542-561, June.
    7. Ma, Yin-Jie & Jiang, Zhi-Qiang & Podobnik, Boris, 2022. "Predictability of players’ actions as a mechanism to boost cooperation," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 164(C).
    8. Kobi Abayomi, 2024. "How & Why To Use Audience Segmentation to Maximize (Listener) Demand Across Digital Music Portfolio," Papers 2406.09226, arXiv.org.
    9. Matúš Medo & Manuel S. Mariani & Linyuan Lü, 2022. "The simple regularities in the dynamics of online news impact," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 5(1), pages 629-646, May.
    10. Verluise, Cyril & Cristelli, Gabriele & Higham, Kyle & de Rassenfosse, Gaetan, 2020. "The Missing 15 Percent of Patent Citations," SocArXiv x78ys, Center for Open Science.
    11. Xiao, Yu & Liu, Liangliang, 2024. "How does information competition affect new product diffusion? Insights from computational experiments," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 183(C).
    12. Sidorov, Sergei & Mironov, Sergei, 2021. "Growth network models with random number of attached links," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 576(C).
    13. repec:cup:judgdm:v:13:y:2018:i:5:p:471-483 is not listed on IDEAS
    14. Cunha, Leonardo R. & Pessa, Arthur A.B. & Mendes, Renio S., 2024. "Shape patterns in popularity series of video games," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 185(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0225385. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.