Bechdel test

A character in Dykes to Watch Out For explains the rules that later came to be known as the Bechdel test (1985)

The Bechdel test (/ˈbɛkdəl/ BEK-dəl) asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. Many contemporary works fail this test of gender bias.

The test is named after the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel. In 1985, she had a character in her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For voice the idea, which she attributed to a friend, Liz Wallace. The test was originally conceived for evaluating films but has since been applied to other media. It is also known as the Bechdel/Wallace test,^[1] the Bechdel rule,^[2] Bechdel's law,^[3] or the Mo Movie Measure.^[4]

History

Gender portrayal in popular fiction

In her 1929 essay A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf observed about the literature of her time what the Bechdel test would later highlight in more recent fiction:^[5]

All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. [...] And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. [...] They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that [...]^[6]

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. Female characters were portrayed as being involved in sex twice as often as male characters, and their proportion of scenes with explicit sexual content increased over time. Violence increased over time in male and female characters alike.^[7]

The Bechdel test

What is now known as the Bechdel test was introduced in Alison Bechdel's comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. In a 1985 strip titled "The Rule",^[8][9] an unnamed female character says that she only watches a movie if it satisfies the following requirements:^[4]

1. It has to have at least two women in it,
2. who talk to each other,
3. about something besides a man.^[9][10]

Bechdel credited the idea for the test to a friend and karate training partner, Liz Wallace.^[10][11] She later wrote that she was pretty certain that Wallace was inspired by Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One’s Own, reproduced in part above.^[12]

The test, which has been described as "the standard by which feminist critics judge television, movies, books, and other media", moved into mainstream criticism in the 2010s.^[13] By 2013, an Internet newspaper described it as "almost a household phrase, common shorthand to capture whether a film is woman-friendly",^[14] and the failure of major Hollywood productions such as Pacific Rim (2013) to pass it was addressed in depth in the media.^[15] According to Neda Ulaby, the test still resonates because "it articulates something often missing in popular culture: not the number of women we see on screen, but the depth of their stories, and the range of their concerns."^[10]

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.^[16]

Several variants of the test have been proposed—for example, that the two women must be named characters,^[17] or that there must be at least a total of 60 seconds of conversation.^[18]

Application

Only a small proportion of films pass the Bechdel test, according to writer Charles Stross^[19] and film director Jason Reitman.^[20] According to Mark Harris of Entertainment Weekly, if passing the test were mandatory, it would have jeopardized half of the 2009 Academy Award for Best Picture nominees.^[17] The news website Vocativ, when subjecting the top-grossing films of 2013 to the Bechdel test, concluded that roughly half of them passed (although some dubiously) and the other half failed the test. The authors also found that the films that passed the test earned a total of $4.22 billion in the U.S., while the ones 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."^[21]

Stross noted that about half of the films that do pass the test only do so because the women talk about marriage or babies.^[19] Works that fail the test include some that are mainly about or aimed at women, or which do feature prominent female characters. The television series Sex and the City highlights its own failure to pass the test by having one of the four female main characters ask: "How does it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends? It's like seventh grade with bank accounts!"^[10]

Explanations that have been offered as to why relatively few films pass the Bechdel test include the relative lack of diversity among scriptwriters^[10] and other movie professionals: in 2012, only one in six of the directors, writers, and producers behind the 100 most commercially successful movies in the U.S. were women.^[15] Professionals' assumptions about the audience's preferences may also be relevant: A scriptwriting student at UCLA wrote in 2008 that she was told by professors that the audience "only wanted white, straight, male leads" and not, as she quoted a male industry professional as saying, "a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about".^[22]

The website, bechdeltest.com, is a user-edited database of some 4,500 films classified by whether or not they pass the test, with the added requirement that the women must be named characters. As of November 2013, it listed 56% of these films as passing all three of the test's requirements, 11% as failing one (the women's conversations are about men), 23% as failing two (the women don't talk to each other) and 10% as failing all three (there are not two named female characters).^[23]

In addition to films, the test has been applied to other media such as video games^[24][25] and comics.^[26]

Limitations

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.^[2] A work may fail the test for reasons unrelated to gender bias, such as because its setting works against the inclusion of women (e.g., Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, set in a medieval monastery).^[3] For these reasons, the Telegraph film critic, Robbie Collin, criticized the test as prizing "box-ticking and stat-hoarding over analysis and appreciation", and suggested that the underlying problem of the lack of well-drawn female characters in film ought to be a topic of discourse, rather than films failing or passing the Bechdel test.^[27]

In an attempt at a quantitative analysis of works as to whether or not they pass the test, at least one researcher, Faith Lawrence, noted that the results depend on how rigorously the test is applied. One of the questions arising from its application is whether a reference to a man at any point within a conversation that also covers other topics invalidates the entire exchange. If not, the question remains, how one defines the start and end of a conversation.^[1]

Nina Power wrote that the test raises the questions of whether fiction has a duty to represent women (rather than to pursue whatever the creator's own agenda might be) or to be "realistic" in the representation of women. She also wrote that it remained to be determined how often real life passes the Bechdel test, and what the influence of fiction on that might be.^[19]

Derived tests

The Bechdel test has inspired others to formulate gender-related criteria for evaluating works of fiction or nonfiction.

Russo test

In 2013, the American lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) media organization GLAAD introduced the "Vito Russo Test", intended to analyze the representation of LGBT characters in films. Inspired by the Bechdel test and named after film historian Vito Russo, it encompasses three criteria:^[28][29]

1. The film contains a character that is identifiably lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender.
2. The character must not be solely or predominantly defined by their sexual orientation or gender identity.
3. The character must be tied into the plot in such a way that their removal would have a significant effect.

Finkbeiner test

The Bechdel test also inspired the Finkbeiner test, a checklist to help journalists avoid gender bias in articles about women in science.^[30]

See also

• Celluloid ceiling

References

External links

• Bechdel Test, user-edited film database
• Bechdel Testing Comics blog
• Bechdel Gamer blog