A new study is showing more about how women are saying less than their male counterparts in Disney films.
Linguists Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer are currently working on a project to analyze the dialogue in Disney films. During their preliminary research they discovered that not only do female characters typically speak less than their male counterparts in many of the Disney princess movies, but that newer Disney films as recently as 2014's Frozen have female princess leads speaking less than the princesses in older films like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty.
According to The Washington Post, Fought and Eisenhauer found that the dialogue is split an even 50-50 in Snow White but drops to 60-40 in Cinderella. Sleeping Beauty does a bit better with women having 71 percent of the dialogue but by the time the Disney Renaissance began with 1989's The Little Mermaid it would appear that Disney experienced a backslide. In The Little Mermaid, men took 68 percent of the dialogue (granted, Ariel was voiceless for the latter half of the film) but even in Pocahontas, a movie centered totally around a female protagonist who kept her voice throughout the film, men had more than three quarters of the dialogue.
Fought and Eisenhauer says that part of this trend may be carelessness. They also found another potential culprit for many of the movies, even the ones centered around a princess are populated with male side characters, like Gaston and Beast in Beauty and the Beast, Mushu in Mulan, and Aladdin's Genie. Even prominent female side characters like Mrs. Potts get lost in the sea of male sidekicks.
On the flip side, People reports that the study also showed a higher occurrence of compliments in newer Disney films. Women were twice as likely to receive compliments based on their achievements as opposed to their looks in newer films like Brave, Tangled, and The Princess and the Frog!