Bechdel test

Bechdel test, metric used to evaluate the presence and dimensionality of women in fictional media such as films and television.

The Bechdel test is named for cartoonist and graphic novelist Alison Bechdel, who in 1985 introduced the original criteria of the test in her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008). In the strip “The Rule,” a character states that she will watch a movie only if it has at least two women who talk to each other about a topic other than men. In the 21st century those guidelines became known as the Bechdel test, a shorthand method to illustrate the dramatic gender disparity in Hollywood films. Bechdel herself prefers to call the test the Bechdel-Wallace test to acknowledge her friend Liz Wallace, who inspired “The Rule.” The friends were reportedly influenced by the 20th-century novelist Virginia Woolf, who observed in her essay “A Room of One’s Own” (1929) that she rarely saw women presented as friends in fiction.

Common variations on the original guidelines include the requirement that both women characters are named, say more than five words to each other, or share more than one minute of screen time. According to the Bechdel Test Movie List, a database that classifies more than 10,000 movies according to whether they pass the test, the oldest film that passes the Bechdel test is Georges Méliès’s silent film Cinderella (1899).

A 2014 analysis by the statistics website FiveThirtyEight found that about half of a sample of almost 1,800 movies released between 1970 and 2013 had at least one scene in which two women discuss something other than a man. The analysis also found that the share of movies that passed the Bechdel test had increased since 1970 but had plateaued in the later decades of the sample. In addition, the analysis found that the median budget of films released between 1990 and 2013 that passed the Bechdel test was 35 percent lower than that of films released in the same time period that failed the test.

Criticism of the Bechdel test

Critics of the Bechdel test point out that it is unable to gauge the quality of a film’s representation of women or determine whether a film is feminist. Additionally, critics have noticed that the test fails to account for other relevant dimensions of identity and experience, such as race and social class.