Women speak just a quarter of words in this year’s best picture nominees

While the only officially gendered awards for the Oscars are for acting, it’s no secret the Academy historically has favored men when it comes to handing out statuettes. Between 1929 and 2026, women made up less than 18% of all nominees, according to a report by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.

If you exclude the acting nominees, women have been nominated for just under 13% of all awards in the nearly century since the awards began, said Stacy L. Smith, who founded the initiative in 2005 to track inequality in entertainment.

Smith said the numbers, while stark, aren’t surprising.

“This industry cannot change itself,” Smith said. “To create change, you really need to work with folks and bring them in.”

To better understand where gender disparity stands today, we analyzed who actually speaks in the 10 films up for what many consider to be the highest honor in film: best picture at this Sunday’s Academy Awards.

Why? Because gender disparity in dialogue tells us something about the kinds of films that get nominated for awards — or made in the first place — and whose stories tend to be institutionally valued.

We went into this analysis knowing that historically, films that contend for best picture have been dominated by stories driven by male characters. We analyzed the 10 nominated films of 2026 and also analyzed the 2025 nominees to determine the most recent patterns.

Our findings: Women characters spoke about a quarter of the words. That’s down from a third of words in last year’s nominated films.

“Whether we look at just who's on screen, and now when we look at how much they speak, your findings reiterate this real lack of inclusion for women and girls on screen,” Smith said.

The details:

Men overwhelmingly dominate dialogue in eight films. In each — save for Bugonia — at least 70% of the words go to men. Bugonia has the narrowest difference at 56% men and 44% women, snagging the third-highest percentage of female dialogue.

Two films stand out for having twice as much dialogue by women than the overall average of 25%. In Sentimental Value, women speak 57% of the words, and in Hamnet, they speak 51%.

One Battle After Another is the only film where an explicitly nonbinary character speaks. However, their number of words spoken — 25 — is so small compared to the rest of the dialogue that it comes out to 0.2% of the film.

Hamnet is the only best picture nominee to be directed by a woman: Chloé Zhao.

How this compares to last year

Last year, women spoke the majority of words in three films: Emilia Perez, Wicked and I’m Still Here. In all three, women spoke at least 60% of the words.

In 2025, like this year, one film directed by a woman, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, was nominated for best picture.

Why lead characters matter 

This year, Sentimental Value, Hamnet and Bugonia have the biggest share of dialogue by women among the best picture nominees. They’re also the only films with a lead woman character.

Michelle (Emma Stone), the main character of Bugonia, speaks the most out of the three women in lead roles. Of the leads in nominated films, she ranks fourth overall behind Marty (Timothée Chalamet) in Marty Supreme, Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) in Frankenstein and her own co-lead, Teddy (Jesse Plemons).

Agnes (Jessie Buckley) from Hamnet ranks fifth. Nora (Renate Reinsve) from Sentimental Value ranks eighth behind the male leads from One Battle After Another and Train Dreams.

We should note that what constitutes a “lead” role can be subjective. For the purposes of this analysis, we based it on plot summaries and the prominence of the character in the arc of the film.

In most films, lead characters talk more than people in supporting roles. Sentimental Value and Train Dreams are the exceptions. Stellan Skarsgård is nominated for best supporting actor for his role as Gustav Borg in Sentimental Value. Borg speaks about 2,000 words, while his daughter, Nora, speaks about 1,300 in what’s considered a lead role. And in Train Dreams, a man narrates (Will Patton) and speaks about 1,500 words, while Robert Grainier (Joe Edgerton) speaks about 1,400.

Half of last year’s best picture nominees had a woman as the lead character. Female leads outnumbered male leads seven to six, and they generally spoke a greater share of dialogue than them too — save for Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) from Conclave and Bob Dylan (Chalamet) from A Complete Unknown.

Unlike this year, not all films with a woman in a lead role had majority women’s dialogue overall. In Anora and The Substance, women still spoke less than men.

However, lead characters did speak more words than any other character individually — except for in Wicked, where Glinda (Ariana Grande) speaks about 200 more words than Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo).

To try to measure how interested characters are in themselves compared to others and compare that across genders, the analysis looked at how often characters speak “I” words such as “I,” “me” or “my” (among others) versus “you” words like “you,” “your” or “yours” (among others).

We found that women speak more about themselves in half of the best picture nominees. That includes Sentimental Value, Bugonia, Frankenstein, Marty Supreme and The Secret Agent. Admittedly, this is a limited evaluation. It doesn't include first-person plural words like “we,” it doesn’t include third-person pronouns like “he,” “she” or “they,” and it doesn't include the names of characters if they're used to address others. The bottom line: It shouldn't be taken as definitive, especially not without context from the movie.

What women talk about on screen has been the subject of interest for some time. In 1985, Alison Bechdel, a graphic artist, started talking about her criteria for watching a film. Now commonly called the Bechdel test, she said a film had to 1) feature two women characters who 2) talk to each other about 3) something other than a man. This analysis did not measure whether the best picture nominees passed the Bechdel Test, but it’s nonetheless an alternative way to measure women’s representation.

Looking at this data comprehensively — while taking into account the percent of words spoken by women, which films have a woman lead, the content of women’s dialogue and its relationship to their share of words — one film emerges as a standout.

And the Oscar for Most Woman-Driven Story goes to …

An image from the film "Sentimental Value."

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MK2 Films

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Directed by Joachim Trier, the Norwegian film Sentimental Value follows sisters Nora (Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) as they reunite with their estranged father, filmmaker Gustav Borg (Skarsgård). Elle Fanning also stars in a supporting role as actor Rachel Kemp. Aside from best picture, the film received eight other nominations.

Sentimental Value has the highest percentage of words spoken by women. It’s one of just three films with a woman lead. And women refer to themselves more than they refer to the characters they speak to.

It’s the only film where women speak the majority of words and where their word choice favors themselves.

How we got here

Sexism in Hollywood has been the subject of scholarly research, books and, yes, movies. Women are underrepresented in what’s known as “below-the-line” roles, as well as in top executive positions. While the #MeToo movement that called out powerful men in Hollywood led to some actions, change has been slow.

Carolyn Finger, a former media analyst at Variety and Luminate, said conversations around representation — like the #OscarsSoWhite social media campaign in 2015 — help to bolster change in the industry. But there’s still much work to be done.

“What I’ve observed is that when those conversations happen, there is incremental change, but it’s not often sustained change,” Finger said.

This dialogue analysis, she added, “look[s] at who literally has a voice.”

To be clear, the quantity of words spoken is just one measure. On screen, sometimes silence, an action or a particular facial expression carries a greater message than words could convey. And a male-driven story may still have strong, nuanced and well-written women characters.

What's next

Smith said that to create change, studios need to adopt more equitable hiring practices and ensure the films they produce reflect the people watching them.

“If you’re a shareholder, if you go to the movies and buy tickets. If you support these companies by watching their shows, communicate back at what you’re not seeing and why that’s a problem,” Smith said.

Still, this year could be a potentially historic Oscars ceremony. The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative reported that a record-tying 33% of this year’s Oscar nominees are women. Hamnet director Chloé Zhao is the second woman, and first woman of color, to be nominated for best director twice. And if she wins, she’ll be the first woman to win best director more than once.

The 98th Academy Awards will take place 4 p.m. Sunday.