What’s in a Face? Gender Representation of Faces in Time, 1940s-1990s
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Keyword
Gender representationTime Magazine
Attitudes toward women
Photography theory
Time Magazine archives, 1940s to 1990s
Psychology
Visual studies
History
Women's studies
Gender studies
Gender equality
Social equality
Journal title
Journal of Cultural AnalyticsDate Published
2020-03-16
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Show full item recordAbstract
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.DOI
https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.12266ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.12266
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