Every feature film in the WhatSphere catalog carries four relative appeal indices, one each for Young Men, Young Women, Older Men, and Older Women, normalized so the four average 50. To measure how a whole genre leans, we collapse those four into a gender axis: a genre male share, Young Men plus Older Men, and a female share, Young Women plus Older Women. Because the four spheres sum to roughly 200, a perfectly gender-balanced genre reads about 100 and 100. The further apart the two halves, the more the genre is, on average, built for one side.
The figures below pool every scored movie in each genre, weighted by title count across release years. They describe central tendency, not individual films: a balanced genre still contains skewed titles, and a skewed genre still contains balanced ones.
The balanced end
Four genres come closest to even. Animation is the most gender-balanced genre overall, at a 104.9 male share versus 95.1 female share, a gap of under 10 points. Family and Drama sit just behind it. And one genre is the only category in the entire catalog that tilts female on average: Romance, at 94.6 male share against 105.5 female share. It is a modest lean, about 11 points, but it is the single exception to an otherwise male-leaning industry mean.
Genre gender balance, most even to most skewed
| Genre | Films | Male share | Female share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Animation | 134 | 104.9 | 95.1 |
| Romance | 388 | 94.6 | 105.5 |
| Family | 177 | 105.8 | 94.2 |
| Drama | 1099 | 107.3 | 92.9 |
| Documentary | 185 | 110.4 | 89.6 |
| Comedy | 746 | 110.7 | 89.3 |
| Fantasy | 210 | 115.0 | 85.1 |
| Mystery | 165 | 117.7 | 82.3 |
| Horror | 194 | 122.8 | 77.2 |
| Thriller | 469 | 128.0 | 72.1 |
| Crime | 344 | 129.1 | 71.1 |
| War | 77 | 129.1 | 70.9 |
| Western | 33 | 130.0 | 70.0 |
| Adventure | 352 | 134.8 | 65.2 |
| Action | 461 | 143.1 | 56.9 |
The skewed end
Action is the most male-skewed genre by a clear margin, at a 143.1 male share against 56.9 female, with Young Men averaging 81 and Older Women averaging just 19. Adventure follows at 134.8, then Western, War, and Crime, all clustered near a 129 to 130 male share. The ordering is intuitive once you see it, but the size of the gap is the surprise: Action leans roughly nine times further from balance than Animation does.
Casting tells a parallel story
Audience skew is not the only axis the data tracks. Each genre also records the share of films with a clearly male or female lead. Here the contrast sharpens at the extremes. Documentary records female leads in under 2 percent of titles and male leads in 9 percent, with most films ensemble or subject-driven. Western records about 17 percent male leads to 4 percent female. Comedy and Romance carry the highest female-lead shares, around 26 and 22 percent. The casting figures move in the same direction as the audience figures without being identical, which is expected: who is on screen shapes, but does not fully determine, who a film is built for.
Reading this responsibly
Three caveats matter. First, each film is filed under a single primary genre, so a romantic comedy lands in exactly one bucket, not two. Second, these are relative indices, so a genre with a 143 male share is not literally drawing a 143-to-57 crowd; it describes the shape of appeal, not raw headcount. Third, the means hide real spread. The most useful way to use this table is as a prior, not a verdict: it tells you which way a genre usually leans, and therefore which individual titles are most interesting precisely because they break their genre pattern.
The other axis: age
Gender is only half of what the spheres measure. The same data sorts genres by generation, and the ordering is different. Action and Adventure skew sharply young as well as male, with Young Men near 81 and Older Women near 19. Animation and Family skew young across both genders, which is precisely why they land among the most gender-balanced: they pair a young male and a young female audience. Drama, Documentary, Mystery, and especially War and Western skew old, with Older Men the highest sphere; Western averages 75 Older Men. This reveals that the balanced genres reach their balance by two entirely different routes. Animation balances young men against young women; drama balances older men against older women. Both read near even on the gender axis, but they are serving opposite ends of the age axis to get there.
That distinction matters for anyone using these averages. A studio reading that animation and drama are both gender-balanced might assume they reach the same crowd; they do not. The practical value of the genre table is as a two-dimensional map rather than a single ranking. Read the male-versus-female share to place a genre on the gender axis, then read the young-versus-old spheres to place it on the age axis. Only together do they describe who a genre actually tends to gather, and only then does an individual title that breaks its genre pattern become legible as the interesting exception it is.
