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 $k$-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.

21 pages, 3 figures. Updated version (submitted for publication)

References in corpus (5)

• The NumPy array: a structure for efficient numerical computation
• New Model of Internet Topology Using k-shell Decomposition
• Emergence of network features from multiplexity
• Differences in the spatial landscape of urban mobility: gender and socioeconomic perspectives
• Interplay between $k$-core and community structure in complex networks