A study into the language of characters in almost 1,000 film scripts has revealed how sexism is embodied by characters on the silver screen.

Using automated tools for linguistic analysis, the research found that women characters tend to be around five years younger than their male partners, according to a Times report.

If female characters are taken out of the plot, it often makes no difference to the story, found a study due to be published in the Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

The research by USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab (SAIL), found that women’s roles were more often focused on issues using “language connecting with family values”.

Men’s language was linked with achievement, while their conversations contained more swear words and was associated with sex and death.

Men also had substantially more lines – 37,000 dialogues – whereas women had just over 15,000.

“Writers consciously or subconsciously agree to established norms about gender that are built into their word choices,” Anil Ramakrishna, one of the study’s researchers, said in the newspaper report.

Upon analysis of the scripts, the study found that there were seven times more male than female writers and twelve times more male directors than women.