Veronica Carlan @carlan_veronica is the Lead Learning and Development Specialist at Elder Research. Her professional background is a non-linear mix of analysis, data science, research, and college math and statistics teaching. She is currently focused on helping individuals and organizations grow in technical, data-centered areas through strategic learning and development (L&D) visions and targeted, effective learning strategies that focus on personal enrichment. Part of these strategies involves depicting data science in a relatable way by demonstrating how people use statistical and probabilistic reasoning in everyday life.
Episode Description
Romantic comedies are rife with plucky heroines. Small bookstore owners are being pushed out by big corporations, runaway brides, and Perpetual bridesmaids. But where are the scientists, microbiologists and engineers, and statisticians? One researcher went looking for them, which is the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Veronica Carlan.
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington
Romantic comedies are rife with plucky heroines. There are small bookstore owners being pushed out by big corporations, runaway brides and perpetual bridesmaids. But where are the scientists? Where are the microbiologists and engineers and statisticians? One researcher went looking for them. And that's the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and stories is a production of Miami University's departments of statistics and media, journalism and film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me as always is regular panelist John Bailer, emeritus professor of statistics at Miami University. Our guest today is Veronica Carlan. Carlan is the lead Learning and Development Specialist at elder research. Her professional background is in a nonlinear mix of analysis, data science research, and college math and stats teaching. She's currently focused on helping individuals and organizations grow in technical data centered areas through strategic learning and development visions. Among the strategies she uses in her work is depicting data science in a relatable way, by showing how people use stats in everyday life. Carlan is also the author of an article about the statistically significant lack of STEM women in romantic comedies. The article was a runner up and the Significance 2022 Statistical Excellence Award for early career writing. Veronica, thank you so much for joining us today.
Veronica Carlan
Thank you so much for having me. And for that warm introduction. It's great to be here.
Rosemary Pennington
What made you decide to investigate the visibility or lack thereof of STEM women in rom coms?
Veronica Carlan
Great question. So the reason that I looked into this is actually twofold. The first is that in a lot of movies, we see women following one of two tropes. The first is this girlish approachable woman who is plucky and fun, and tends not to be super career motivated. And then the second is the career of a motivated woman who is cold, unapproachable, and distant from colleagues and friends. And this just does not describe any women I have ever met. I think that men in general are far too complex to be put into either of these categories. And so I wanted to research something that is near and dear to my heart, which is romantic comedies, but also in a way that portrays women as being career driven in a STEM way. And then the second reason that I explore this area is because, as you said, in your introduction, I really like making statistics, relatable. And so when I teach, I always have my students use data that they're interested in and find their own data for the projects, because I think they'll become more invested. And for me, this was a dataset that I found very interesting. And I think it's not just me, because as I've talked about this with more and more people, men, women and non-binary folks alike, all have a favorite romantic comedy. And so writing about statistics in this way where everyone can relate to the content makes it more digestible.
John Bailer
So when you were starting to investigate this and think about this in the context of these movies, how did you decide what you should expect to see in these movies if movies look like the workforce?
Veronica Carlan
Another great question. So, romantic comedies are unique because they tend to have females in the lead roles. And while all other females or all other film genres do have some films with females in the lead, romantic comedies uniquely, almost always have females in these lead roles. And consequently, the females that are cast in these roles and written for these roles tend to be more modern and complex than women in secondary or tertiary roles. And so, because women evolved in these films to portray more modern women, for example, Mary Tyler Moore, was the first woman to be portrayed wearing pants. Historically, women had always worn skirts but because she was portraying a housewife, housewives found it easier to clean wearing pants, and so she wanted to demonstrate that. Similarly, Meg Ryan was portrayed as someone who was the first female to consistently break up with someone in a bad relationship without having another man to jump to. And so she was portraying that it's okay to be single, which is something new. And so these kinds of trends are consistent in romantic comedies where women are matching modern women in today's culture, and one of the things that modern women are doing is entering STEM careers. And so I wanted to see if this trend of portraying modern women in romantic comedies is consistent with what we're seeing in the labor market now?
Rosemary Pennington
So what does the labor market look like as far as women in STEM careers in the US?
Veronica Carlan
Great question. So I used an NSF study from 2019 that depicted the US workforce not only showed males and females, so it did not include math non binary people. And what they found was that 48% of all of the workforce was occupied by women. And of that 48%, 16% was stem. And so really, 8% of all positions are occupied by women. But if we are restricting it to female positions exclusively, then 68%, or 16%, of the female workforce is in STEM. And so I wanted to see if films match that and what that means is for every 100 rom coms that were produced, there should be between 16 and 17. Afemale leads in a stem position if it matches the current labor market.
John Bailer
Alright, so you had this, this national survey of occupation that you could use to kind of set your baseline for comparison, so that you had to go out and grab some data, you had to go out and extract the information? What were some of the sources that you considered and what ultimately did you decide to use as your source of data for these rom coms?
Veronica Carlan
So there are a variety of sources for rom com data. But for me, the most trusted source I always go to when I can't put my finger on where I know someone from a movie or how many stars something gets is IMDB. And so I used all films from IMDb from 1990 to 2021, that were labeled both romantic and a comedy. But I also wanted to match the report from the NSF. And so I restricted my dataset to only those produced by US companies. Because I didn't incorporate how many women in STEM were employed in the UK, the European Union, etc. I also restricted this to only romantic comedies where there was a female lead, because again, I wanted to match that report. So there are several romantic comedies where there's a male lead, such as Definitely Maybe Ryan Reynolds is describing the story of how he met his ex wife. And that one had to be eliminated because the lead is a male. And so then what did you do? So then I use the same NSF report. So I tried to maintain consistency throughout to identify all the jobs that were listed as STEM. And then I looked at all 249 films from 1990 to 2021, that fit my criteria and identified all of the female jobs in those films, and then categorized them with whether or not they were identified as a stem role as categorized by that NSF report.
Rosemary Pennington
So what kind of jobs are we thinking about? Oh, I'm sorry, what kind of jobs would be falling under that stem category as far as that report goes?
Veronica Carlan
So under that stem category, there are a variety of jobs because stem touches a variety of fields. And so agricultural food scientists, biologists, horticulturists, mathematicians, physicians, physicians and physicists, the list goes on. And one that I thought was particularly interesting is that a patent attorney falls under that as well, because patent attorneys are required to have some sort of engineering undergraduate degree, and a lot of them are going into technical patents. And so I've found that particularly interesting as well.
John Bailer
So how many movies did you find? And of those movies? How many had a stem leap?
Veronica Carlan
So there were 249 movies from 1990 to 2021 that actually fit the criteria. And I found that there were only 12 movies where female leads were in STEM positions. And interestingly enough, a lot of those films took place in the 1990s. I actually expected that there would be an upward trajectory, but instead it sort of followed this bimodal distribution where we had a significant number of women in STEM positions in the 1990s and then a drop off in the Early 2000s, and then a peak back up in the later 2010s and 2021.
Rosemary Pennington
That's really interesting. I wonder, was there anything in that data from the NSF that would indicate that that might have mirrored what was happening in the labor market? Or is that just a fluke in your research?
Veronica Carlan
I do not believe it mirrors the labor market. Instead, I have another theory, which is that in the 90s, there was a popular show called The X Files. And this has been documented actually. So in the X Files, one of the lead characters is Dana Scully, and she is a medical–I believe she's a doctor. And her role is to provide a lot of the reason and the critical thought, as a foil to the other lead role. And after watching this, there was a surge of women in the medical profession in the 1990s. And when asked why they said, I want to be the next Dana Scully. And this was known as the Scully effect. And so in the 90s, there, we saw a lot of women moving into these positions. And because stem positions tend to pay well, I'm assuming they stayed in these positions. And so I wonder if that also played a role in the surge of STEM positions, and that is being portrayed in the media, and then it sort of drops back down and picks back up later.
John Bailer
So you're saying that this occurred? Because the truth was out there?
Rosemary Pennington
Is there any fictional character that you have, that you have an inkling might have sort of been driving this sort of resurgence in the films you looked at if Dana Scaly was driving something in the 90s? Is there another character? I know Anna tour has played a character on fringe, although she's more a law enforcement person than a scientist, but, you know, is there a character that sort of might indicate why this was picking back up?
Veronica Carlan
Um, so that is a great question. I have not seen if it's another character. But one thing I have noticed is that historically, romcoms have not been particularly diverse in casting. And one of my favorite rom coms is Crazy Rich Asians. And so we're seeing more diversity in romcoms. Now. And I wonder if that extends to not just racial and ethnic diversity, but also diversity of type of women? And that might be why we're seeing this resurgence of women in STEM fields.
John Bailer
Well, I gotta ask this, I want to know what these 12 movies are before, before Rosemary breaks us. So I want to, but I can't. I can't let her go on a break without knowing what those movies are.
Veronica Carlan
Sure. So I can say all of the names, but then I'll provide some context to the ones I've seen, which embarrassingly is many of them. So I love all of our movies. So interestingly enough, Hallmark movies I did not include in this list because they didn't fit into the rom com IMDB. They're more just romantic movies. But I'm glad that you are a teen rom com teen romantic movie. Absolutely. So the name of the movie is green card in which the female plays a horticulturist one fine day in which the woman plays an architect the truth about cats and dogs in which she plays a vet. There's Something About Mary where Mary is a surgeon returned to me where the female lead is a zoologist, the prince and me where the main character is a pre med student just like heaven where Reese Witherspoon plays a doctor. No Strings Attached were Natalie Portman plays a doctor sleeping with other people where the lead character plays a medical student, Crazy Rich Asians my personal favorite, where Rachel is an economics professor, isn't it romantic, where the lead character plays an architect and Palm Springs. And this one is unique because she becomes a physics expert, though she doesn't start the movie being a physics expert. So the premise of this movie is that she enters into a state where she repeats the same day over and over it's, you know, Groundhog Day situation. And to get out of that state, she has to understand the time space continuum to break the cycle. And so because she's reliving the same day over and over, she has an infinite amount of time to read physics. And I particularly like this movie because even though she starts by not being a stem person or a math person or a physics person, it demonstrates that all you need is time to learn this material. So anyone could be a stem person, it's not that there is some barrier to entry. All you need is the time and the devotion to the subject.
Rosemary Pennington
You're listening to Stats and Stories. And today we're talking to Veronica Carlan, about rom coms and stats. I've never heard of that last film you were talking about. And now I want to go out and watch because I'm so intrigued by the idea of a rom com being wrapped up in someone becoming a physicist.
Veronica Carlan
It's a great movie. And I also particularly love so she is trapped in this with her male counterpart, but it's she who solves the problem, he has actually been living this life for longer than she has. And so he had more opportunities to try to solve this problem. And instead, she is the one who researches and figures out how they can get unstuck from this perpetual Groundhog Day situation.
John Bailer
So as you were going through that, that list and description of all the characters, I didn't hear a lot of stat and data science love, you know, I've just, you know, just I'm feeling like, you know, that we're just not there or data journalists, for that matter. You know, we could have certainly seen that, you know, but alas, I don't hear it yet. You know,
Veronica Carlan
Unfortunately, I'm totally with you. You know, I would love it if there was someone who was discussing the need to learn Python programming or to people fall in love, despite their differences of Bayesian stats and a frequentist approach that would just make my heart sore. But close enough to that are actually these romcom books that are coming out that are focused on STEM women. So Ali Hazelwood is a phenomenal author. And she has written two novels and three novellas in which all of her female characters have a PhD, and work in some sort of scientific, rigorous field, and all of them code. So in one of them, the lead female character is working for NASA. And she is designing a helmet that will allow the NASA astronauts to be able to communicate through what they're seeing to the people down in Houston. And in another the, the main character is actually a PhD student where she is doing biomedical engineering. And so I think that there is an opening, because what I found is that a lot of these positions that are stem tend to be like that, and medicine, which in and of themselves lend themselves to being stem, but also taking on a little bit of a caretaker role that women are often portrayed not not to diminish this because I think that women being caretakers is not only socialized, but also fantastic, I love my female caretakers. But I think that to push into those other STEM fields, we really do need new content, and that is being portrayed at least at the literary level, which often makes its way into movies.
Rosemary Pennington
So I was talking with my husband about this, actually, as I was preparing for this interview. And he was raising the point like there's the you know, the scientist and one of the James Bond movies is a woman played by Denise Richards I just watched the horrific and I sorry, I'm sorry to anyone who liked it. Latest Jurassic World movie where you know, they're larger and then Bryce Dallas Howard, also plays a scientist. So I wonder number one, like, are you interested in sort of exploring other genres of film? Or are you just definitely locked down on rom com? And two, I want you to talk a bit about the sort of why this matters? Like, some people might listen to this and think, Well, who cares? And I think you make an argument in your article about why this does matter.
Veronica Carlan
So I love that you bring up that there are women in STEM roles in guns on Earth, other than romcom, um, a few things about that. First of all, I think that a lot of times when we see those scientists' roles in anything other than science fiction, their secondary, they are not the primary. And so you know, you gave the example of James Bond. It's even in the old school James Bond movies, where q is his quartermaster who designs all these cool things. He was there to assist James Bond and he has sort of this one dimensional type of personality. So I think that that's part of the reason that I didn't necessarily want to explore anything other than rom coms, because I am personally tired of women being portrayed as one dimensional, and so I didn't, I just didn't Want to add credence to that? But secondly, not there aren't any other genres in which women tend to lead those being those lead roles consistently. And so I think that this is different. And then again, when we have something like science fiction, well, science fiction is predicated a lot on STEM. And so even if we were to look at something like, Okay, let's look at the lead roles in these science fiction movies. Well, by nature, they're going to stem. And I think that that pertains to a lot of other genres as well, if you're looking at an action film, typically speaking, the lead needs to be in some sort of action oriented job, put in a rom com, the purpose of telling the story is for the lead character to fall in love. Her job rounds her out as a character. And so I think that to portray, that this can be you, you could be the one that falls in love. And that relatability aspect, we need to have more women in STEM and romcoms. That's the reason I focused specifically on that genre. And that also lends itself to why I didn't do this with men, because I'm sure that if we looked across genres, there's also not a consistent number of men in STEM roles in film. However, men tend to dominate the lead roles in almost every other genre. And so the statistics get completed, when you start incorporating something like science fiction in with action, because of what I described before.
John Bailer
You know, I don't think we've ever had her tell us what she saw, though, Rosemary, I think. You know, what, what did you find?
Veronica Carlan
Oh, great. So I found that there are 12 of the 249 films where women are in STEM roles. And then I because of the nature of how I investigated this, so you're either in a STEM role or not. So that's binary. It's a fixed number of trials, which is the 249 movies. And there's no reason to assume that any one movie has a different probability than any other movie of having a stem lead, I found that I could use the normal approximation to the binomial distribution. And in doing so, I found that there was a p value of 0.0000017. And what that means, in layman's terms is essentially that this did not happen by accident, right? It's not circumstantial that we're seeing, or, as far as you're gonna get a statistician to say, right, we can reject the null hypothesis or state that it is very unlikely that the fact that women are not portrayed in STEM roles in rom coms is not by accident. It's a deliberate choice.
John Bailer
Yeah, so I saw that the result in your paper, you reported that essentially, the number that you're seeing is about five standard deviations less than you would expect, if representation was the same as what you see in the workforce. That's pretty dramatic. That's so you know, I found when I, when I looked at this, you know, I want to follow up on a question that Rosemary posed. So now, let's give you a chance to talk about what part of the story?
Veronica Carlan
Great. So first and foremost, I think that for the film industry in general, it's great to have women that we connect to, because when you think of your favorite film, a lot of times it's not this one dimensional character, it's a multi dimensional character that you in some way connect with, it doesn't necessarily have to be you. But it's someone you know, it's someone that you want to be friends with. And so I think seeing ourselves in those roles is really important. And by ourselves, I mean, women in STEM. Additionally, STEM is not going away. I tend to focus on math and statistics and data science and where that labor force is going, and it is only increasing, which means there's a real need for jobs and for people to go into these types of positions. But as I'm sure you know, having just anyone in any position, especially if the person in the position looks and thinks exactly like the other person occupying the secondary position doesn't help you to interrogate data well, because the best way to interrogate data is to come at it with different ideas and different vantage points. And so what that means is going into these fields really requires diversity for us to be able to interrogate data in a holistic way. And so we need to see more women going into these fields, and there are a variety of programs that exist to try to help women to feel successful or promote STEM and data science and statistics in young girls, but they have varying degrees of success. The one thing that has been consistent is having a female role model in STEM. However, because women don't occupy the majority of these positions, access to a female role model often doesn't exist for women. So a supplement to that could be seeing women in another form of media. And that can be through media that we consume, and romcoms because they're largely directed to women. As an audience, seeing women in these positions helps to act as a sort of mentor for these young females who may be interested in pursuing these positions. And I think that's exactly what happened in the X Files. When we saw Dana Scully become this de facto mentor for women.
Rosemary Pennington
Before we leave, this is our Valentine's Day episode. And I wonder if you have a recommendation for Valentine's Day viewing out of those 12 films that you talked about?
Veronica Carlan
Yes, I do. And I mentioned it before, but I highly recommend everyone watch Crazy Rich Asians. I was initially hesitant because the name Crazy Rich Asians just doesn't really resonate. I don't like the idea of Crazy Rich. However, what it really is, is a Cinderella story, where amazingly the youngest NYU economics professor is playing Cinderella to her prince who, you know, just has a ton of money, but she is truly taking on that Cinderella-esque relatability of being fun and quirky and cute, but also driven and brilliant. And so I just absolutely adored the movie once I saw it. And I've seen it so many times since then, because she is this complex female character. So she has love on her brain. She loves Nick, but she also excels at game theory. She's the youngest professor and she has cute quirks. So there's one point where she takes her glasses and Jessica's hubba-hubba to her male counterpart, and it's so adorable, so highly recommended, and the mug on the scene is incredible in that film. Oh my gosh. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Rosemary Pennington
Full. Veronica, thank you so much for joining us today.
John Bailer Thanks, Veronica.
Veronica Carlan
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
Rosemary Pennington
Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics, and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple podcasts, or other places you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.