US researchers have trawled through Hollywood film scripts to reveal there truly is a gender imbalance on our screens.

Hollywood has been peppered with allegations of sexism and racism in recent months, but investigators at Polygraph wanted to find out if indeed the claims were true.

“It’s all rhetoric and no data, which gets us nowhere in terms of having an informed discussion,” wrote Hannah Anderson and Matt Daniels.

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To find the true extent of the gender bias, Anderson and Daniels studied the screenplays of 2000 Hollywood films, comparing how many words female and male characters spoke.

The results revealed male voices really do dominate Hollywood – even in the genres you would not expect.

On the front line

Mega-hit Frozen had two female leads – but more male dialogue.

Of 30 Disney princess films studied, 22 had more male dialogue, despite often having women in the lead role.

Even Mulan – Disney’s 1998 film about a Chinese girl who pretends to be a man to take her father’s place in the army – swings toward the blue end of the scale.

Mushu, Mulan’s pet dragon, has more dialogue than Mulan herself which is surprising for a film with an ostensibly feminist slant.

Of the 2000 films considered, just 22 per cent had women in lead roles. Even more rare was finding a film with two women leads (18 per cent), while finding the same for men was a walk in the park (82 per cent).

If you thought romantic comedies would have it in the bag for female voices, you’d be wrong: they still lag behind at 42 per cent on average.

Unsurprisingly, the worst offenders were often war films: Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down and The Hurt Locker all had 100 per cent male voices.

Other all-male films were Apollo 18, Reservoir Dogs, Stand By Me and The Revenant.

Bright lights

Polygraph‘s data allows people to search specific films to check their gender dialogue balance, and a few stand out as positive anomalies.

Stepmom, the 1998 film starring female heavyweights Susan Sarandon and Julia Roberts, contained a rare 83 per cent female dialogue, as did the Sex and the City film.

The Shawshank Redemption – the highest rated film on IMDB – has 100 per cent male dialogue.

In the action genre, female-slanting films were almost impossible to find, with Catwoman and GI Jane the only identified by the study.

Comedies and dramas were most likely to give women more lines, but the problem still stood.

When it came to age, the story only became sadder for women.

Men only kept increasing their dialogue percentage well into their 50s, while after age 31 women dropped right off.

The research also allows you to sort by decade, with the results showing there’s been little change by decade since the 1980s.

The Bechdel test

Daniels and Anderson conceived the study after being criticised for using the Bechdel test in a previous study.

The Bechdel test diagnoses a film as sexist if it does not contain two female characters who speak to each other in at least one scene – and the conversation can’t be about a man.

Readers pointed out that for historical reasons, that wasn’t always possible, so the researchers decided studying dialogue might be more appropriate.