Findings in title quoted from the linked summary^1 and its hyperlinked journal paper.^2

From the linked summary^1 released 13 Feb. 2023:

>A new paper in Public Understanding of Science and an associated report by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, Eleanor Drage, and Kerry McInerney shows the results of an analysis of the 142 most influential AI films in history, establishing that gender inequalities in film are more extreme than in real life.

>Just 8% of all depictions of AI professionals from a century of popular film are women – and more than half of these are shown as subordinate to men.

>This gender imbalance is even bigger than in the real-world AI industry, in which 20% of AI professionals are women.

From the hyperlinked journal paper:^2

>The aim of this study is to examine the gendering of portrayals of AI researchers in influential fiction film over the past century, 1920–2020.

>[We] explain our choice of media and period; our criteria for ‘AI researcher’; how we have coded gender; our criteria for ‘influential’ in film; and the corresponding sources of our corpus.

>We have examined films over the course of a century, from 1920 to 2020. The total number of films featuring AI is sufficiently small that this large temporal range results in a corpus that is manageable but meaningful.

>1920 is an appropriate start date both because of the rapid development of the cinema in the United States and Europe after the First World War, and because this decade saw the earliest high-impact portrayals of intelligent machines and their creators, in Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (1921) and Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927).

>Of the 1413 films in our corpus, we identified 142 as featuring AI. Of these, 86 films clearly showed or referred to an AI engineer or scientist.

>The total number of AI engineers or scientists shown was 116, as 63 films showed only one such figure, 16 films showed 2 and 7 films showed 3 figures that met our criteria.

>Of these 116 AI engineers or scientists, 88 were men, 10 were male robots, aliens, animals or AIs, and 9 were corporations led by men, giving a total of 107 male figures, or 92% of the total. Seven were human women and two were female non-humans, giving a total of nine female figures, or 8% of the total.

^1 Who makes AI? Inequality in AI films, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, 13 Feb. 2023, http://lcfi.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2023/feb/13/who-makes-ai-inequality-ai-films/

^2 S. Cave, K. Dihal, E. Drage, and K. McInerney (2023) Who makes AI? Gender and portrayals of AI scientists in popular film, 1920–2020. Public Understanding of Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09636625231153985