An Unfair Affinity Toward Fairness: Characterizing 70 Years of Social Biases in BHollywood

Bollywood, aka the Mumbai film industry, is one of the biggest movie industries in the world. With a current movie market share of worth 2.1 billion dollars and a target audience base of 1.2 billion people, Bollywood is a formidable entertainment force. While the entertainment impact in terms of lives that Bollywood can potentially touch is mammoth, no NLP study on social biases in Bollywood con- tent exists. We thus seek to understand social biases in a developing country through the lens of popular movies. Our argument is simple – popular movie content reflects social norms and beliefs in some form or shape. We present our preliminary findings on a longitudinal corpus of English subtitles of popular Bollywood movies focusing on (1) social bias toward a fair skin color (2) gender biases, and (3) gender representation. We contrast our findings with a similar corpus of Hollywood movies.