What’s in a Face? Gender Representation of Faces in Time, 1940s-1990s
Journal Title
Journal of Cultural Analytics
Readers/Advisors
Journal Title
Term and Year
Publication Date
2020-03-16
Book Title
Publication Volume
Publication Issue
Publication Begin
Publication End
Number of pages
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Abstract
We extracted 327,322 faces from an archive of Time magazine containing 3,389 issues
dating from 1923 to 2014, classified the gender of each extracted face, and discovered that
the proportion of female faces contained within this archive varied in interesting ways over
time. The proportion of female faces first peaked in the mid-to-late 1940s. This was
followed by a dip lasting from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. The 1970s saw another
peak followed by a dip over the course of the 1980s. Finally, we see a slow and steady rise
in the proportion of female faces from the early 1990s onwards. In this paper, we seek to
make sense of these variations through an interdisciplinary framework drawing on
psychology, visual studies (in particular, photography theory), and history. Through a close
reading of our Time archive from the 1940s through the 1990s, we conclude that the visual
representation of women in Time magazine correlates with attitudes toward women in both
the historical context of the era and the textual content of the magazine.
Citation
Jofre, Ana, Josh Cole, Vincent Berardi, Carl Bennett, and Michael Reale. 2020. “What’s in a Face? Gender Representation of Faces in Time, 1940s-1990s.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 5 (1). https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.12266.