Women do talk less than men...on screen, that is

ACTRESSES land less than half as many film roles as their male counterparts.

And when they are given a part, they get only half as much dialogue as the men, a study has found.

Researchers at the University of Southern California analysed 1,000 movie scripts and discovered that female characters are much less likely to take a central role.

Women portrayed just over 2,000 characters and had just over 15,000 dialogue scenes, men had almost 4,900 roles and more than 37,000 dialogue scenes. Male dialogue contained more words related to achievement, the researchers report in the journal Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

They found there were seven times more male than female writers and 12 times more male directors. The research follows a row in Hollywood over the gender pay gap, with actresses including Jennifer Lawrence, Natalie Portman and Helen Mirren speaking out against discrimination.