Bechdel-Wallace Test of Star Trek DS9

This data is testing if the episodes per season of the TV show Star Trek DS9 pass or fail the Bechdel-Wallace test. For more information check the Bechdel-test.md file. Simple criteria for the test to end in a pass is the following:

Criteria :

  1. must have 2+ named women
  2. named women talk to each other
  3. topic of discussion is not a man/ men including regarding relationship(s)

Notes for DS9

  • Null indicates that 1 female was present in a scene with males or not in the scene at all.
  • Jadzia Dax was so frequently the only female in scenes filled with males due to her being the only female that leaves the station on a regular basis, later episodes Kira Nerys does as well
  • If an episode has both a fail and a pass, the longer conversation determines the total outcome
  • Out of all Star Trek writers for shows TOS, TNG, DS9 and VOY, 66 are female and 302 are male. The female writers in total make up 21.85% of all Star Trek writers.
  • DS9 Female main characters: Kira Nerys, Jadzia Dax, Ezri Dax, Keiko, Kai Winn, Leeta, Female Founder

Read in the dataset

ds9 = read.csv(‘StarTrek-DS9.csv’)

Episodes per season

ds9 %>% count(Season)

  Season     n 
   <dbl> <int>
1      1    19
2      2    26
3      3    26
4      4    25
5      5    26
6      6    26
7      7    25

Bechdel-Wallace initial pass/fail

ds9 %>% count(Bechdel-Wallace) %>%
ggplot( aes(x= Bechdel-Wallace, y= n ) ) +
geom_col( fill= c(“#cc0000”,‘#00cc00’)) +
labs(title = “Star Trek DS9 Bechdel-Wallace Test”,
subtitle = “Total number of pass and fails per episode”)

The number of fails of the Bechdel-Wallace test are 152 and the number of passes is 21.

DS9 Directors by Gender

ds9 %>%
select(Director_Gender,
Writer_Gender, Episode, Bechdel-Wallace) %>%
group_by(Director_Gender) %>%
count()

Female directors count is 7 while the Male directors is 166.

DS9 Director’s Gender & Bechdel Test

ds9 %>%
select(Bechdel-Wallace, Director_Gender, Episode, Season) %>%
# filter(Bechdel-Wallace ==“Pass”) %>%
group_by(Episode,Bechdel-Wallace)

DS9 Female Directors Episodes

ds9 %>%
filter(Director_Gender == “Female”) %>%
select(Title, Director, Season)

DS9 Writers with 1 or more Female by Season

ds9 %>%
filter(Writer_Gender ==“Female”) %>%
select(Title, Writer_Gender, Season, Episode, Written_By)

DS9 Female (only) Writers by Season

ds9 %>%
select(Season, Director_Gender, Writer_Gender) %>%
group_by(Season,Writer_Gender) %>%
filter(Writer_Gender ==“Female”) %>%
count()

DS9 Bechdel-Wallace Passes by Season

The data for the barchart is selected on pass variable and there is only 1 female Director (Season 2), a total of 2 female writers (1 female in Season 1, and in Season 2: 1 female + male)

ds9 %>%
filter(Bechdel-Wallace ==“Pass”) %>%
select(Season,Episode,Writer_Gender,Director_Gender)

DS9 Writers by Gender grouping

ds9 %>%
group_by(Writer_Gender) %>%
count()

Linear Regression

A linear regression model was conducted to see if there was any affect a Director or Writer’s gender had on if it passed or failed the Bechdel-Wallace test.

  Call:
  lm(formula = Bechdel ~ Director_Gender + Writer_Gender + Season, 
      data = ds9)
  
  Residuals:
      Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
  -0.1514 -0.1287 -0.1233 -0.1178  0.9117 
  
  Coefficients:
                                Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
  (Intercept)                   1.105551   0.164569   6.718 2.81e-10 ***
  Director_GenderMale          -0.014517   0.129410  -0.112    0.911    
  Writer_GenderFemale (+ men)  -0.085598   0.254370  -0.337    0.737    
  Writer_GenderFemale + Female -0.088316   0.347191  -0.254    0.800    
  Writer_GenderFemale + Male    0.059456   0.159669   0.372    0.710    
  Writer_GenderMale             0.045844   0.101841   0.450    0.653    
  Season                       -0.002718   0.013483  -0.202    0.841    
  ---
  Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
  
  Residual standard error: 0.3327 on 166 degrees of freedom
  Multiple R-squared:  0.004003,    Adjusted R-squared:  -0.032 
  F-statistic: 0.1112 on 6 and 166 DF,  p-value: 0.995

As you can see that there is no statistically signifant affect of either writer or director’s gender has on if an episode passes the Bechdel-Wallace test.