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Quantifying Women's Marginalisation in Ibero-American Film Culture During the First Half of the Twentieth Century: A Network-Science Proposal

Ainamar Clariana-Rodagut, Alessio Cardillo

Abstract

The research presented here uses the tools of social network analysis to empirically show a socio-cultural phenomenon already addressed by the social sciences and history: the historical marginalisation of women in the field of cinema. The novelty of our approach lies in the use of a large amount of heterogeneous historical data. On the one hand, we built a network of interactions between people involved in the film field in Ibero-America during the first half of the twentieth century. On the other hand, we propose a $k$-core decomposition and a multi-layered analysis, as a quantitative way to study the position of women within the cultural melieu. After conducting our analysis, we concluded that women were mostly situated in the outer $k$-shells of the empirical network, and their distribution was not uniform across the $k$-shells. From a qualitative perspective, these results can be interpreted as the consequence of the lack of evidence of the participation of women in the public sphere.

Quantifying Women's Marginalisation in Ibero-American Film Culture During the First Half of the Twentieth Century: A Network-Science Proposal

Abstract

The research presented here uses the tools of social network analysis to empirically show a socio-cultural phenomenon already addressed by the social sciences and history: the historical marginalisation of women in the field of cinema. The novelty of our approach lies in the use of a large amount of heterogeneous historical data. On the one hand, we built a network of interactions between people involved in the film field in Ibero-America during the first half of the twentieth century. On the other hand, we propose a -core decomposition and a multi-layered analysis, as a quantitative way to study the position of women within the cultural melieu. After conducting our analysis, we concluded that women were mostly situated in the outer -shells of the empirical network, and their distribution was not uniform across the -shells. From a qualitative perspective, these results can be interpreted as the consequence of the lack of evidence of the participation of women in the public sphere.
Paper Structure (4 sections, 1 equation, 3 figures, 1 table)

This paper contains 4 sections, 1 equation, 3 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Methodology
  3. Results
  4. Conclusions

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: Organization of the nodes grouped by gender across the $k$-shells. The horizontal axis indicates the $k$-shell index, $k_\text{s}$, whereas the vertical axis denotes the fraction of nodes with a given gender in each $k$-shell (inner $k$-shells are the most central ones). The left panel displays the results for the empirical ALL network, whereas the right panel displays the case of the random counterpart (results are averaged over 50 realisations of the rewiring process).
  • Figure 2: Heatmap matrix encoding the values of the Jaccard score, $J(\alpha,\beta)$, computed between pairs of networks $\alpha$ and $\beta$ corresponding to the layers of the multiplex network. Light shades denote small similarities, whereas those on the diagonal are by definition equal to one. The symmetry of $J(\alpha,\beta)$ allows us to display only the matrix's upper half.
  • Figure 3: Differences between the fraction of women nodes belonging to $k$-shell, $k_\text{s}$, of the empirical network, $f_{W}^{e}$, and its average counterpart computed in a randomly rewired network, $f_{W}^{r}$. Each panel accounts for a distinct network, whether the whole network (ALL) or a single layer (REL, COR, CB, PUB, and EV). The red star indicates the deepest $k$-shell (i.e., the network's degeneracy ($D$)) obtained in the random network counterpart $D^{r}$, whereas the dashed line denotes the $k$-shells for which only the empirical value, $f_{W}^{e}$, exists. Random values are obtained by averaging the results over 50 realisations.