What was the point of going back a century for this study? Women were underrepresented as anything but love interests, objects to be rescued, mothers, nurses, or teachers a hundred years ago. 1920 was the first year women could even vote in the U.S.!

What's more, "artificial intelligence," as we understand it today, hasn't existed in fiction that long. This is the rationale mentioned in the paper: >We have examined films over the course of a century, from 1920 to 2020. The total number of films featuring AI is sufficiently small that this large temporal range results in a corpus that is manageable but meaningful. 1920 is an appropriate start date both because of the rapid development of the cinema in the United States and Europe after the First World War, and because this decade saw the earliest high-impact portrayals of intelligent machines and their creators, in Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (1921) and Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927).

While the sample size may indeed be small, that's no excuse for ignoring the representativeness of the sample. In fact, despite the fact that that the earliest representation of a woman as an AI-scientist that they found was in 1997, they included a corpus of the previous 77 years.

I'm all for equality, and women certainly could use more representation in AI, both in fiction and fact, but this is just bad research methodology.