In film, a study of gender portrayals in 855 of the most financially successful U.S. films from 1950 to 2006 showed that there were, on average, two male characters for each female character, a ratio that remained stable over time. Women were twice as likely as men to be involved in sexual activity, and this only continued to increase over time.
The rules now known as the Bechdel test first appeared in 1986, in Alison Bechdel's comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For. In a strip titled "The Rule", two women, who resemble the future characters Lois and Ginger, discuss seeing a film and one woman explains that she only goes to a movie if it satisfies the following requirements:
The other woman acknowledges that the idea is pretty strict, but good. Not finding any films that meet their requirements, they go home together. The context of the strip may have referred to alienation of queer women in film and entertainment, where the only possible way for a queer woman to imagine any of the characters in any film may also be queer was if they satisfied the requirements of the test, but it has wider feminist implications, pointing out that women in movies are rarely seen outside of their relationship to men.
The test has also been referred to as the "Bechdel–Wallace test" (which Bechdel herself prefers), the "Bechdel rule", "Bechdel's law", or the "Mo movie measure". Bechdel credited the idea for the test to a friend and karate training partner, Liz Wallace, whose name appears in the marquee of the strip. She later wrote that she was pretty certain that Wallace was inspired by Woolf's A Room of One's Own.
Several variants of the test have been proposed—for example, that the two women must be named characters, or that there must be at least a total of 60 seconds of conversation. The test has also attracted academic interest from a computational analysis approach. In June 2018, the term "Bechdel test" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
The test moved into mainstream criticism in the 2010s and has been described as "the standard by which feminist critics judge television, movies, books, and other media". In 2013, Internet culture website The Daily Dot described it as "almost a household phrase, common shorthand to capture whether a film is woman-friendly". The failure of major Hollywood productions to pass the test, such as Pacific Rim (2013), was addressed in-depth in the media.
In 2013, four Swedish cinemas and the Scandinavian cable television channel Viasat Film incorporated the Bechdel test into some of their ratings, a move supported by the Swedish Film Institute.
In addition to films, the Bechdel test has been applied to other media such as television series, video games and comics. In theater, British actor Beth Watson launched a "Bechdel Theatre" campaign in 2015 that aims to highlight test-passing plays.
Films set in alternative or future worlds, such as fantasy and science fiction, are more likely to pass the Bechdel test. This may be because these genres are more likely to avoid traditional gender roles and stereotypes.
Several analyses have indicated that passing the Bechdel test is associated with a film's financial success. Vocativ's authors found that the films from 2013 that passed the test earned a total of $4.22 billion in the United States, while those that failed earned $2.66 billion in total, leading them to conclude that a way for Hollywood to make more money might be to "put more women onscreen". A 2014 study by FiveThirtyEight based on data from about 1,615 films released from 1990 to 2013 concluded that the median budget of films that passed the test was 35% lower than that of the others. It found that the films that passed the test had about a 37 percent higher return on investment (ROI) in the United States, and an equal ROI internationally, compared to films that did not pass the test.
In 2018, the Creative Artists Agency and Shift7 analyzed revenue and budget data from the 350 top-grossing films of 2014 to 2017 in the United States. They concluded that female-led films financially outperformed other films, and that those that passed the Bechdel test (60% of the films studied) significantly outperformed the others. They noted that of films since 2012 which took in more than one billion dollars in revenue, all passed the test.
A research study from 2022 showed that production budget was negatively associated with the probability of passing the Bechdel test across 1200 movies from 1980 to 2019. However, the observed increase of films passing across years was stronger for higher budget films. Increases of movies passing the Bechdel test over the years from 1980 to 2019 were also stronger for movies with higher revenues, and higher audience evaluations (IMDb ratings).
Explanations that have been offered as to why many films fail the Bechdel test include the relative lack of gender diversity among scriptwriters and other movie professionals, also called the "celluloid ceiling": In 2012, one in six of the directors, writers, and producers behind the 100 most commercially successful movies in the United States was a woman.
The Bechdel test only indicates whether women are present in a work of fiction to a certain degree. A work may pass the test and still contain sexist content, and a work with prominent female characters may fail the test. A work may fail the test for reasons unrelated to gender bias, such as because its setting makes the inclusion of women unlikely (e.g., Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, set in a medieval monastery) or because it has few characters in general (e.g., Gravity, which has only two named characters). What counts as a character or as a conversation is not defined. For example, the Sir Mix-a-Lot song "Baby Got Back" has been described as passing the Bechdel test, because it begins with a valley girl saying to another "oh my god, Becky, look at her butt".
In response to its increasing ubiquity in film criticism, the Bechdel test has been criticized for not taking into account the quality of the works it tests ("bad" films may pass it, and "good" ones fail), or as a "nefarious plot to make all movies conform to feminist dogma". According to Andi Zeisler, this criticism indicates the problem that the test's utility "has been elevated way beyond the original intention. Where Bechdel and Wallace expressed it as simply a way to point out the rote, unthinkingly normative plotlines of mainstream film, these days passing it has somehow become synonymous with 'being feminist'. It was never meant to be a measure of feminism, but rather a cultural barometer." Zeisler noted that the false assumption that a work that passes the test is "feminist" might lead to creators "gaming the system" by adding just enough women characters and dialogue to pass the test, while continuing to deny women substantial representation outside of formulaic plots. Similarly, the critic Alyssa Rosenberg expressed concern that the Bechdel test could become another "fig leaf" for the entertainment industry, who could just "slap a few lines of dialogue onto a hundred-and-forty-minute compilation of CGI explosions" to pass off the result as feminist.
The Bechdel test has inspired others, notably feminist and antiracist critics and fans, to formulate criteria for evaluating works of fiction, in part because of the Bechdel test's limitations. In interviews conducted by FiveThirtyEight, women in the film and television industry proposed many other tests that included more women, better stories, women behind the scenes, and more diversity.
The "Kumbalangi Test" asks if a film features a man who talks to any other person about anything other than anger and vulnerability. It was proposed in an essay and named for the Malayalam language film Kumbalangi Nights.
The "reverse Bechdel test" asks whether a work features men who talk to men about something other than a woman. A 2022 study that analyzed 341 popular films of the last 40 years showed that almost all (95%) passed the reverse Bechdel test, speaking to a much stronger representation of men than women.
The "Sphinx test" by the Sphinx theater company of London asks about the interaction of women with other characters, as well as how prominently female characters feature in the action, how proactive or reactive they are, and whether they are portrayed stereotypically. It was conceived to "encourage theatremakers to think about how to write more and better roles for women", in reaction to research indicating that 37% of theater roles were written for women as of 2014[update].
A test proposed by TV critic Eric Deggans asks whether a film that is not about race has at least two non-white characters in the main cast, and similarly, writer Nikesh Shukla proposed a test about whether "two ethnic minorities talk to each other for more than five minutes about something other than race". A 2017 speech by Riz Ahmed inspired the Riz test about the nature of Muslim representation in fiction, and Johanson analysis includes a rating of films on their representation of women of color.
The Bechdel test inspired a test for the presence of climate change in narratives. The "Climate Reality Check", a "Bechdel-Wallace test for a world on fire", was introduced in March 2024 and applied to the 2023 Oscar nominees. Its release was covered by NPR, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and other websites. The test is intended to be applied to "any story set on Earth, which takes place now, in the recent past, or in the future. It doesn't apply to high fantasy or to stories set on other planets or in the distant past." It includes two components:
The Bechdel test has also inspired gender-related tests for nonfiction. Laurie Voss, at the time CTO of npm, proposed a Bechdel test for software: source code passes this test if it contains a function written by a woman developer which calls a function written by a different woman developer. Press notice was attracted after the U.S. government agency 18F analyzed their own software according to this metric.
The Gray test, intended to improve citational practices, is named after and was created with the scholar Kishonna Gray. It requires that scholarly nonfiction texts cite the scholarship of "at least two [authors who identify as] women and two nonwhite [Black, Latino, or Indigenous] authors but also must mention it meaningfully in the body of the text". Like the Bechdel test, this was created as a "baseline test for establishing a bare minimum for responsible citation; it is not an aspirational test for best practices". It is being used by scholars and academic journals to vet articles.
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