Dialectics of the female and male characters in 'Mad men': a quantitative and qualitative analysis

Abstract

This article investigates the dialectics between female and male characters in the television series Mad Men (Mattew Weiner, 2007-2015) through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the pilot chapter “Smoke gets in your eyes” (Alan Taylor, 2007). Set in the New York advertising world of 1960, the pilot poses the thematic, narrative and stylistic bases of Mad Men’s first season, premiered in the media context of the so-called first wave of the third golden age of television. Methodologically, we use the specialized tool Encuadres, software created by Jesús González Requena, that allows the analytical manipulation of audiovisual texts and the obtaining of quantitative results through computation. In order to compare the importance of the female and male characters in the narrative universe of the series, we focus on the segmentation of the text in scenes, shots and ellipses, as well as in obtaining percentages of the visual, scenic and verbal presences of each of the characters. In this way, by valuing the quantitative data in relation to the qualitative analysis of Mad Men and the characterization of its characters, we conclude that men have a higher presence, which speaks of their power position, and that women, nevertheless, are able to make their most out of their opportunities. The latter finding points towards the increasing and transforming emergence of female demands and empowerment in the 1960s.