Big data analysis reveals staggering extent of gender inequality in creative industries

The term big data may bring to mind swaths of private information held by tech companies.But lots of big data is,in fact, visible to all we just may not think of it as data.If you ve been to the movies recently, you will have seen a dataset of credits listing the cast and crew members alongside their roles. While the credits from any one film may not be that useful, the credits from every film can form a big dataset. At Nesta and the PEC (a new policy and evidence centre for the creative industries), we have been exploring how these types of non-confidential big datasets can shine new light on gender representation in the creative industries.Gender representation has traditionally been gauged using surveys of workers. But most surveys havent been going for that long and it can take several years (after launching a new survey) before we can tell how the gender mix is changing. Also, surveys often dont go beyond counting the number of women and men and so can’t shed light on how prominent each group was in the creative process,or how they were portrayed in a particular art form.