A study of the language used in nearly 1,000 movie scripts has officially confirmed something we already knew: that female characters on screen are so reductive that if they were removed they’d have pretty much no effect on the overall plot.

And it doesn’t stop there. Women characters are always younger and speak a lot less than their male counterparts too, according to the report in The Times.

The research, conducted by the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab (SAIL), used automated tools to analyse dialogue throughout scripts from previous decades, looking at 7,000 characters and 53,000 dialogues.

Their analysis found that across all of the scripts, nearly 5,000 characters were men, while only 2,000 were women. And men had 37,000 on-screen conversations - 22,000 more than women.

Hollywood’s gender divide means women speak half as much as men