The machine’s lower success rate for women also could support the notion that female sexual orientation is more fluid. The paper suggested that the findings provide “strong support” for the theory that sexual orientation stems from exposure to certain hormones before birth, meaning people are born gay and being queer is not a choice. Broadly, that means “faces contain much more information about sexual orientation than can be perceived and interpreted by the human brain”, the authors wrote.
When the software reviewed five images per person, it was even more successful – 91% of the time with men and 83% with women. Human judges performed much worse than the algorithm, accurately identifying orientation only 61% of the time for men and 54% for women. The data also identified certain trends, including that gay men had narrower jaws, longer noses and larger foreheads than straight men, and that gay women had larger jaws and smaller foreheads compared to straight women. The research found that gay men and women tended to have “gender-atypical” features, expressions and “grooming styles”, essentially meaning gay men appeared more feminine and vice versa. The researchers, Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang, extracted features from the images using “deep neural networks”, meaning a sophisticated mathematical system that learns to analyze visuals based on a large dataset. Though the report found comedies to be the most inclusive genre, it also singled out two films from that genre, Get Hard and The Wedding Ringer, for having what it called “more blatant and incessant gay panic humor than we have seen in a Hollywood film in years.The machine intelligence tested in the research, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and first reported in the Economist, was based on a sample of more than 35,000 facial images that men and women publicly posted on a US dating website. The one transgender character counted in the study, who appeared in the comedy Hot Pursuit, “existed purely to give the audience something to laugh at when her identity is revealed.” And as for the Vito Russo Test, only 36 percent of films passed, down from more than half of the films studied the previous year and the lowest percentage since the study began four years ago.
Nearly three quarters of LGBT characters had minor roles with less than 10 minutes of screen time and LGBT representation continues to skew heavily toward gay males (77 percent), with only one transgender character represented.Īnd just because LGBT characters are present, of course, does not mean they are presented in a positive light. Though the number of LGBT characters in mainstream releases, at 47, was up from 28 counted last year, the study found that racial diversity among those characters had decreased by 7 percentage points. The analysis recorded the number of LGBT characters, their race/ethnicity and sexual orientation/gender identity, screen time and the presence of anti-LGBT humor.Īs with recent studies about women and minorities in film, the results of GLAAD’s study do not offer much to celebrate. In its new report, GLAAD analyzed 126 releases from the seven film studios with the highest theatrical grosses in 2015, as well as four smaller studio imprints which release lower-budget movies that might be described as “art house” fare.
To pass the test, named for the LGBT activist and author of the 1981 book The Celluloid Closet, a movie must satisfy three requirements: 1) It has a character that is identifiably lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgender 2) That character is not defined solely on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity and 3) The character is critical to the plot (in other words, “The character must matter”).
Though the Bechdel Test is frequently invoked these days, a lesser known test which it inspired is quietly gaining traction: The Vito Russo Test, which GLAAD created in 2013 to measure films’ success or lack thereof in LGBT representation-and which Hollywood, according to the organization’s 2016 Studio Responsibility Index-largely fails.