A Historical Comparison of Gender Gap in Chinese Film Industry Based on Complex Networks

The representation of women in the film industry is insufficient. The overall performance is that in the whole career of actors, actresses participate in fewer films, have less influence, and their box office is also lower. In this paper, based on China's film information, actor information and box office information on douban.com, we reconstruct nearly 10000 gender determined actors and more than 3100 films with specific box office in China in the past 20 years since the development of films in the 20th century, These films include 22 film types in mainland, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan of China, which provides an effective data set for the study to compare gender differences. Based on complex networks method, we find that the contradiction is that in the past 20 years, the number of actresses participating in films has been increasing. At the same time, the gender difference between actors and actresses in film output and film box office has also increased. However, we also find that the invariant with gender difference of 0 is the number of films produced by actors per capita in recent 20 years. In terms of the number of films produced per capita per year, actors have the same professional influence. Finally, we prove that the gender differences in film output and influence in China's film market are largely related to the length of actors' career and actors' participation in high box office films, although there are still gender differences in film output and influence, However, the length of career and the participation rate of high box office films can explain most of the gender differences. This paper analyzes the gender differences in the film industry, which is helpful for the academia and society to reconstruct the sustainable historical dialogue on gender gap. At the same time, it also provides corresponding academic basis for the formulation of policies of the government and relevant institutions.