The Bechdel TestA measure of female representation in film that asks whether a movie has at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. asks three questions of a film: Does it have at least two women? Do they talk to each other? About something other than a man? These criteria are so minimal they almost read as satire. Yet forty years after cartoonist Alison Bechdel first sketched them in a comic strip, roughly half of Hollywood’s output still fails to meet this floor[s]. The test was never meant to be the measure of cinematic feminism. It has become, instead, a measuring stick for how little progress the industry has made.
A Joke That Became a Standard
In 1985, Bechdel was living in a shoebox apartment in New York, working on her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For[s]. One day she drew two women walking down the street, trying to decide what movie to see. One explains she only watches films that meet three requirements: at least two women, who talk to each other, about something besides a man. The punch line? The last film she could watch was Alien, because two women discussed the monster.
Bechdel herself prefers to call it the Bechdel-Wallace test, crediting her friend Liz Wallace for the idea[s]. Both women were influenced by Virginia Woolf, who observed in her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own that fiction rarely portrayed women as friends[s]. Nearly a century later, the observation holds.
The strip sat mostly forgotten until the 2000s, when feminist film students rediscovered it online. “Somehow young feminist film students found this old cartoon and resurrected it in the Internet era,” Bechdel told Fresh Air in 2015, adding that she felt “a little bit sheepish about the whole thing”[s]. The test entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2018.
The Numbers That Haunt Hollywood
The Bechdel Test Movie List, a crowdsourced database tracking over 9,800 films, reports that 57.1% pass all three criteria[s]. That might sound like progress until you consider the reverse: flip the test’s gender, asking whether two men discuss anything besides a woman, and 95% of films pass[s].
That disparity comes from a 2023 study by German researchers Markus Appel and Timo Gnambs, who analyzed 1,200 of the highest-grossing films from the past four decades[s]. The gap is not subtle. Men in cinema exist as full characters who discuss work, war, philosophy, sports, and crime. Women exist, too often, only in relation to men.
Recent data shows the problem persists. About 44% of films released in 2025 failed the test[s]. The proportion passing has increased since the 1970s but plateaued in recent decades[s]. Progress stalled around the halfway mark and stayed there.
The Budget Gap
Films featuring women in substantive roles consistently receive less funding than those that sideline them. A 2014 FiveThirtyEight analysis of 1,615 films found that movies passing the test had a median budget of $31.7 million, compared to $48.4 million for those that failed: 35% less[s].
Academic research has since confirmed this disparity with statistical rigor. A Carnegie Mellon study found the budget gap was significant at p < 0.0000004[s]. Hollywood spends less on films where women talk to each other.
The industry’s justification has long been that films about women do not “travel” well internationally. Producers claim foreign pre-salesThe practice of selling film distribution rights to international buyers before the movie is completed, often used to secure financing. drive financing, and international buyers want male stars. The data contradicts this belief. The FiveThirtyEight analysis found that films passing the test returned $2.68 for every dollar spent, while failing films returned only $2.45[s]. Movies featuring women earned better returns on lower budgets.
The Bechdel Test’s Limitations
Bechdel herself acknowledges the test’s shallowness. “If you think about it, they’re pretty superficial criteria,” she told NPR. “It would be easy to make a movie that fulfilled them in name but kind of missed the point”[s].
American Hustle (2013) passes because two women briefly discuss nail polish. Gravity (2013), dominated by Sandra Bullock’s acclaimed solo performance, fails because she never speaks to another woman. The test cannot distinguish between a token conversation and a feminist masterpiece.
Critics also note the Bechdel Test ignores intersectionalityThe study of how different forms of discrimination like racism and sexism overlap and interact to create unique experiences.. It does not ask which women are represented, whether they are given depth, or whether the film reinforces stereotypes even while technically passing[s]. A film could pass while still being profoundly misogynistic. Bechdel defended Fire Island (2022), a gay rom-com that fails her own test, calling it “pretty feminist in its way” because it centered Asian gay men and drew from Jane Austen[s].
Why It Still Matters
The test’s value lies not in what it measures but in what it reveals. “It gave me the language to explain the difficulty I had in engaging with films where women did not have a significant presence,” observed Angela Coppola, a high school media teacher[s]. The Bechdel Test does not certify quality. It exposes absence.
That 95% of films can clear the reverse test while only half clear the original tells us something about whose stories Hollywood considers universal. Men’s conversations are plot. Women’s conversations are, more often than not, about men. This asymmetry shapes how audiences understand narrative itself: who drives action, who exists as a full person, whose inner life matters.
Data from Gracenote shows that films passing the Bechdel Test perform better at the box office[s]. Audiences want these stories. The obstacle is not the market. It is, as producer Suzanne Todd put it, that “there are still a lot of dinosaurs behind the desks”[s].
Forty years after a cartoonist drew two women deciding they had nothing to watch, roughly half of Hollywood still cannot meet her joke’s three simple requirements. The Bechdel Test was never meant to be enough. It was meant to be obvious. That it remains controversial tells us how far there is still to go.
