The Bechdel Test is named after the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel in whose comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, the test first appeared in 1985. Bechdel credited the idea to her friend Liz Wallace and the writings of Virginia Woolf. After, the test became more widely discussed in the 2000´s, a number of variants and tests inspired by it, emerged. It is therefore also known as the Bechdel-Wallace test. It is a measure of the representation of women in fiction. It asks whether a work features at least two women talking to each other about something other than a man. The requirement that the two women must be named is sometimes added. The majority of films meet these criteria. Passing or failing the test is not necessarily indicative of hoe well women are represented in any specific work. Rather, the test is used as an indicator for the active presence of women in the entire field of film and to call attention to gender inequality in fiction. The media industry studies indicate that films which passes the test financially outperform those that do not.
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 2014, the European cinema fund Eurimages incorporated the test into its submissions mechanism as part of an effort to collect information about gender equality in its projects. It requires a Bechdel analysis of the script to be supplied by the script readers. In 2018, screenwriting software developers began incorporating functions that allow writers to analyse their script for gender representation. Software with such functions includes Highland 2, WriterDuet and Final Draft 11.
In addition to films, the Bechdel test has been applied to other media such as video games and comics. In theater, British actor Beth Watson launched a Bechdel Theatre campaign in 2015 that aims to highlight test-passing plays.
The 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 famous female character may fail the test. A work may fail the test for reasons unrelated to gender bias but such as setting works against the inclusion of women, for example Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose are set in a medieval monastery. 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".
(MY WORK)
So in order to pass the Bechdel test, a film must
- Have 2 named women
- Have them talk to each other
- Have them talk about something other than men
In our film opening: our film opening does not pass teh Bechdel test, but as a full length film it would
