Bechdel test
[13] 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.
[25] According to Neda Ulaby, the test 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".
[27] 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".
[28] The failure of major Hollywood productions to pass the test, such as Pacific Rim (2013), was addressed in-depth in the media.
[30] In 2014, the European cinema fund Eurimages incorporated the Bechdel test into its submission mechanism as part of an effort to collect information about gender equality in its projects.
[32] In addition to films, the Bechdel test has been applied to other media such as television series,[33] video games[34][35][36] and comics.
[37] In theater, British actor Beth Watson launched a "Bechdel Theatre" campaign in 2015 that aims to highlight test-passing plays.
[38] The website bechdeltest.com is a user-edited database of over 10,000 films classified by whether they pass the test, with the added requirement that the women must be named characters.
[40] 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.
[41] A 2018 BBC analysis revealed that among the 89 films that won the Academy Award for Best Picture, 44 (49%) successfully met the criteria of the Bechdel test.
[43] Writer Charles Stross noted that about half of the films that do pass the test only do so because the women talk about marriage or babies.
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?
[29] Writing in the American conservative magazine National Review in 2017, film critic Kyle Smith suggested that the reason for the Bechdel test results was that, "Hollywood movies are about people on the extremes of society — cops, criminals, superheroes — [which] tend to be men."
Such films, according to Smith, were more often created by men because "women's movie ideas" were mostly about relationships and "aren't commercial enough for Hollywood studios".
[49] Alessandra Maldonado and Liz Bourke wrote that Smith was wrong to contend that female authors do not write books that generate "big movie ideas", citing J. K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, and Nnedi Okorafor, among others as counter-examples.
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".
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'.
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.
"[45] The Bechdel test stirred a minor controversy in 2022 when writer Hanna Rosin invoked it in a tweet to criticize the gay romantic comedy Fire Island.
[59] In response, Alison Bechdel humorously posted on Twitter that she had added a "corollary" to the test, whereby a film passes the test if it includes "two men talking to each other about the female protagonist of an Alice Munro story in a screenplay structured on a Jane Austen novel" (this being a description of the plot of Fire Island).
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 analysis evaluates media on criteria that include the basic representation of women, female agency, power and authority, the male gaze, and issues of gender and sexuality.
It asks, "does the film contain a character that is identifiably LGBT, and is not solely or predominantly defined by their sexual orientation or gender identity, as well as tied into the plot in such a way that their removal would have a significant effect?".
[76] Nadia Latif and Leila Latif of The Guardian suggested in 2016 a series of five questions:[77] For Bella Caledonia, poet Raman Mundair contrasted Sandra Oh's character in Killing Eve lacking any reference to her Korean heritage until she "has hit a complete emotional and psychological rock bottom" with the "authentic, true and engaging" Black characters in Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You in order to suggest a more-detailed test of "representation that exists outside the context of whiteness".
[78] Making reference to British East and Southeast Asian media advocacy group BEATS's 3-question test,[79] in 2021, Mundair proposed criteria for how theatrical and broadcasting performances should represent people of color.
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.
