Submission + - Google Testing Software to Judge Hollywood and TV's Portrayal of Women 1
theodp writes: Aside from it being hosted in a town without a movie theater, the 2016 Bentonville Film Festival was also unusual in that it required all entrants to submit "film scripts and downloadable versions of the film" for judgment by "the team at Google and USC", apparently part of a larger Google-funded research project with USC Engineering "to develop a computer science tool that could quickly and efficiently assess how women are represented in films" (an award for "Highest Diversity Score" was awarded at the film fest, fittingly to the film 'Tested'). Fest reports noted that representatives of Google and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy appeared in a "Reel vs. Real Diversity" panel presentation at the fest, where the importance of diversity and science to President Obama was discussed, and the lack of qualified people to fill 500,000 U.S. tech jobs was blamed in part on how STEM careers have been presented in film and television. White House Visitor Records show that in the weeks leading up to the festival, representatives of the Bentonville Film Fest and Google met at the White House with scores of female educators, advocates, and activists from universities and nonprofits, as well as execs from the toy, game, film, television, print, and retail industry. In a 2015 report on a Google-sponsored USC Viterbi School of Engineering MacGuyver-themed event to promote women in engineering, USC reported that President Obama was kept briefed on efforts to challenge media's stereotypical portrayals of women. As for its own track record, Google recently updated its Diversity page, boasting that "21% of new hires in 2015 were women in tech, compared to 19% of our current population," although its most recently posted EEO-1 report showing actual headcount is still from a pay period in 2014.
Typo: MacGuyver should be MacGyver (Score:2)
Oops. Mistakes always more obvious after you hit 'Submit'.