Bechdel test

The Bechdel test is an informal way to determine whether a film or TV show exhibits bias against women in the female characters it presents. It’s named for its inventor, cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who described the test in a 1985 installment of her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. It is sometimes called the Bechdel-Wallace test, including Bechdel’s friend Liz Wallace, whom Bechdel credits with the idea. And in early use the test was sometimes labeled with the misnomer the Mo Movie Measure, after Mo, a character in Bechdel’s strip. That’s a misnomer because Mo didn’t appear in the strip until 1987. The test is in three parts:

1. Does the film have at least two significant (e.g., named) female characters?

2. Do the women talk to one another?

3. Is the topic of their conversation something other than a man?

If the answers to all three questions are “yes,” then the movie passes the test.

It took some twenty years for the name Bechdel test to appear and for the concept to enter into the cultural consciousness. Bechdel test first appears in a 16 August 2005 comment to a post on Bechdel’s blog. The blog text reads:

Julie from Portland, OR, kindly emailed us to let us know that lefty blogs like Pandagon have been discussing the Mo Movie Measure a film-going concept that originated in an early DTWOF strip, circa 1985. We were excited to hear that someone still remembers this 20-year-old chestnut.

But alas, the principle is misnamed. It appears in "The Rule," a strip found on page 22 of the original DTWOF collection. Mo actually doesn't appear in DTWOF until two years later. Her first strip can be found half-way through More DTWOF. Alison would also like to add that she can't claim credit for the actual “rule.” She stole it from a friend, Liz Wallace, whose name is on the marquee in the comic strip, reprinted below.

Then, _swallow, a commenter on that blog post, gave the test its name:

I took the meme to college, where my friends now say, “That movie didn’t pass the Alison Bechdel test.” I guess we should change the name....

The term was soon appearing in print. From Amanda Marcotte’s 2007 book It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments:

The rule is in turns called the Bechdel Test or the Mo Movie Measure, after the comic strip artist Alison Bechdel and her most famous comic creation. The idea is that a movie’s baseline measure to get it past the teeth-grindingly sexist phase is to have two female characters who have at least one conversation with each other that’s not about men. The Golden Girls isn’t a movie, but it passes the Mo Movie Measure with flying colors. The characters on the show talk about men to each other, sure, but they talk about everything else under the sun.

The Bechdel test isn’t a measure of a movie’s quality—Star Wars, Casablanca, and The Godfather all fail the test. Nor is a lack of female roles in any one film necessarily a bad thing—for example, there really is no way to work significant female characters into a movie like Saving Private Ryan. But the test is useful when applied to movies in general to point out how the industry as a whole exhibits a high degree of sexism and the lack of opportunity for female actors.

Sources:

Bechdel, Alison. “The Rule” (comic). Dykes to Watch Out For. Ithaca, New York: Firebrand, 1986, 22–23. Archive.org.

Marcotte, Amanda. It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments. Berkeley, California: Seal Press, 2007, 215. Archive.org.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2018, s.v. Bechdel test, n.

Resmer, Cathy. “The Rule.” Dykes to Watch Out For (blog), 16 August 2005. Archive.org.

Image credit: Alison Bechdel, 1985. Fair use of a low-resolution copy to illustrate the topic under discussion.