How often each occupational group is mentioned in film & TV dialogue, by decade, relative to how many Americans actually work in it. Defaults to the most recent and richest period, 2010–2017.
Over/under-representation index = a group’s share of on-screen profession mentions in that period ÷ its share of U.S. employment. 1.0 = proportional. Above 1 = mentioned more than its real workforce size; below 1 = under-represented. Appearances per 100k workers = dialogue mentions in that period per 100,000 people currently employed in the group.
Appearances: Baruah, Somandepalli & Narayanan (2022), Representation of professions in entertainment media (PLOS ONE) — their published corpus of 3.66M profession mentions in OpenSubtitles dialogue across 133k IMDb titles. Mentions mapped to the 23 SOC major groups (85.7% of all mentions) and bucketed by each title’s release year into decades; dual-mapped professions split evenly. Employment: U.S. BLS OEWS May 2017 (22 civilian groups; 17 exact, 5 smaller groups derived from BLS's published major-group employment shares) + U.S. DoD active-duty strength FY2017 (~1.31M) for Military Specific.
Caveat: The employment denominator is a fixed May 2017 snapshot (BLS adopted the SOC system in 1999, and per-year employment by these exact groups isn’t reachable for earlier decades here). 2017 is an exact period match for the 2010–2017 default; for older decades the per-capita figures read as “mentions then per 2017 worker,” so the over/under-representation ranking is the sounder cross-period comparison. Note OEWS counts wage & salary jobs and excludes the self-employed — a large share of artists, athletes, writers and farmers — which shrinks those denominators and pushes the Arts and Farming groups upward versus a total-workforce basis.
| Occupational group | Appearances | Employed (000s) | Per 100k workers | Media % | Jobs % | Index |
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