Gender Asymmetries in Reality and Fiction: The Bechdel Test of Social Media

The subjective nature of gender inequality motivates the analysis and comparison of data from real and fictional human interaction. We present a computational extension of the Bechdel test: A popular tool to assess if a movie contains a male gender bias, by looking for two female characters who discuss about something besides a man. We provide the tools to quantify Bechdel scores for both genders, and we measure them in movie scripts and large datasets of dialogues between users of MySpace and Twitter. Comparing movies and users of social media, we find that movies and Twitter conversations have a consistent male bias, which does not appear when analyzing MySpace. Furthermore, the narrative of Twitter is closer to the movies that do not pass the Bechdel test than to