The Bechdel Test

The comic strip in which the rules of the Bechdel test were first mentioned (1985)

Even though we are living in the 21^st century and many things have changed over the last few centuries, it is still clear that gender equality is not reality yet. Women experience disadvantages in many areas in life amongst other things in books, movies and TV-series. The Bechdel test is a way to prove if a fictional work portrays women fairly or not. To pass the test the fictional work has to satisfy three requirements:

• It has to feature at least two women
• who talk to each other
• about something other than a man

Often a fourth requirement is added namely that the women have to have a name.
Sounds easy? Apparently it isn’t…

The idea for the test comes from a female character in Alison Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For in 1985 who voiced the rules of the test to another female character. Originally the rules were only applied to movies, but they have since been expanded to other media.  Bechdel credited the idea for the test to her friend Liz Wallace who allegedly was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own (1929). In this essay Woolf claims that there are plenty of women in fiction, but they are mostly shown in their relation to men and not on their own. The test doesn’t necessarily criticize the number of women shown in fiction, but the depth of their storylines and personalities. More often than not women are only featured in movies to bring in sexual content or to pose as love interest for the male protagonist (love triangles including two men and one women are especially popular!). A study has shown that since the 1950s in the most financially successful films of the US there were on average two male for one female character and women  were twice as often involved in scenes with explicit sexual content than man.

Also a fact is that about half of the successful movies including Oscar nominated and awarded films fail the Bechdel test And many movies that do pass the test only pass it because the women in it talk about babies or marriage. Interesting is that many works that are specifically aimed at women like TV-series such as Sex and the City or many romance novels fail the test as well, because even though they often feature more women than men, the whole storylines still  revolve around men.

The website bechdeltest.com is a user-edited website that classifies films by whether they pass or fail the test. Currently 5259 films are listed of which 2978 (56.6%) pass all three requirements of the Bechdel test, 543 (10.3%) pass two requirements, 1187 (22.6%) pass only one requirement and 551 (10.5%) fail all requirements. 

However, it is clear that even if a movie passes all criteria of the Bechdel test, it does not mean that women are presented in the right way. And the other way round it can also happen that films that don’t pass all criteria feature a strong and prominent woman. It’s also possible that works fail the test because they are set in an environment where the inclusion of women wouldn’t make any sense (for example Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose which is set in a medieval monastery). That’s why the test is criticized by many who argue that the Bechdel test doesn’t say anything about good writing or significance and depth of female roles.

The Bechdel test has also inspired a number of other tests for gender-related issues in fictional works. One example is the Russo test, which was created by the American LGBT media organization GLAAD in 2013 and has the following requirements: 

• The film contains a character that identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgender.
• The character must not be solely or predominately defined by their sexual orientation and/or gender identity. 
• The character must be tied into the plot in such a way that their removal would have a significant effect.

In my opinion tests like these can’t be trusted completely because as stated above, passing the Bechdel test doesn’t assure good writing of a fictional female character. Still, I think it is interesting and also sad to see how many movies have so little female representation and how rare portrayals of strong female characters seem to be compared to portrayals of male characters.