Does the movie industry have a problem with sexism? The Bechdel test is intended to remedy the situation

It was invented 30 years ago to test how well women are represented in films: the Bechdel test. Comic book artist Alison Bechdel, who gave the test its name, never intended her test to become a true measure of sexism. “It was a joke […]. But it’s cool,” she said in a recent interview with The Guardian.

And yet the test became a kind of benchmark in the film industry and is also part of scientific studies. For example, a publication about women in fiction that came out last year. A total of 1200 films were analyzed (the 30 most successful of each year from 1980 to 2019). The result: less than half of the films passed the Bechdel test.

But what exactly does this test examine? For a film to pass the Bechdel test, it must be able to answer yes to all of the following questions:

In more recent variants, a fourth criterion has been added: do the women who are having a conversation have a name?

The selection of films that fail the test is long. Fails include: “Avatar”, “The Avengers”, the entire “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”, the original “Star Wars” trilogy, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, “A Star Is Born”, “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel”.

In the Lord of the Rings series, the only time when two female characters “talk” to each other is this:

The Marvel Universe doesn’t fare much better. This video takes a look at 22 Marvel movies – only six that pass the Bechdel test.

The biggest criticism of the Bechdel test is that even if a film meets all the criteria, the female characters can be stereotyped and superficial. This important criterion is not taken into account.

Alison Bechdel agrees. What’s frustrating to her isn’t how many films fail the test, but how many films cynically try to take shortcuts and showcase strong female characters. But they only have the appearance of strength and are not well-developed characters».

In addition to the Bechdel test, there is also the sexy lamp test as a sexism detector in the film industry to answer the question of superficiality. Flat representations of women should be recognized with this. To pass this test, only one question needs to be answered in the affirmative: Does the plot of the movie still work if the female character is removed and replaced with a sexy lamp? In other words, is the female character more than a prop?

The same study that looked at how many movies pass the Bechdel test also looked at something called the reverse Bechdel test. Here the same criteria are used and applied to male film characters. So the question here is, are two male characters (by name) talking to each other about something other than women?

After analyzing 341 films, the study concluded that more than 95 percent of all films examined passed the reverse Bechdel test.

Despite the criticism, the Bechdel test is a good indicator that women are still underrepresented in the film industry. That is also the conclusion of a study by the New York Film Academy, which examined 900 films released between 2007 and 2016. Only a third of all characters who have dialogue roles are female and 12 percent of all films have a balanced cast.

1000 films from 2017 were also examined and the study showed that there were more than twice as many male roles as female roles that year. As a result, men also had more dialogues: 37,000 compared to 15,000 conversations among women.

That was 2017. And today? The University of Southern California has published a report analyzing the 1,600 highest-grossing films of 2022. Conclusion: Women have a leading role in a third. A similar picture is emerging this year. In the ten most successful films to date, three women have a (co-)leading role: “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3”, “The Little Mermaid” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”.