The Bechdel Test, Explained: Where a Joke From a 1985 Comic Strip Became Hollywood's Most Famous Yardstick

In 1985, the cartoonist Alison Bechdel published a short strip in her comic series Dykes to Watch Out For. Two women are walking past a cinema, trying to decide what to see. One of them explains that she has a rule. She only watches a movie if it meets three conditions. It has to have at least two women in it. They have to talk to each other. And they have to talk about something besides a man.

The punchline is that the last film she was able to see was Alien, because the two women in it talk to each other about the monster.

It was a joke, and a good one. Nearly four decades later, it has become one of the most widely used shorthand tools in film criticism, cited by journalists, studied by academics and argued about endlessly online. Bechdel has said she credits the idea to a friend, Liz Wallace, which is why some people call it the Bechdel-Wallace test.

An old observation in a new form

The strip didn't invent the problem it pointed at. In 1929, Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One's Own about how rarely fiction showed women in relation to each other rather than to men. She noticed how startling it felt to read a simple sentence describing one woman liking another. So much literature, she argued, showed women only through their connections to male characters: as wives, lovers, mothers and daughters.

Bechdel's rule turned that literary insight into something anyone could apply in two hours on a Friday night. That simplicity is exactly why it spread.

What the test actually measures

The most common mistake people make is treating the Bechdel test as a measure of whether a film is feminist, good or progressive. It isn't, and it was never meant to be.

A film can pass the test and still be thoughtless, shallow or openly sexist. Two female characters can chat about shoes for ten seconds and technically clear the bar. Meanwhile, a film can fail the test and still be deeply thoughtful about women. Gravity, for instance, has essentially one main character, played by Sandra Bullock, who spends most of the film alone in space. There is no second woman for her to talk to. The test has nothing useful to say about that film.

What the test does measure is a pattern across many films. Applied to one movie, it is a curiosity. Applied to hundreds, it becomes a revealing statistic. When a large share of an industry's output fails a test this basic, it tells you something about who gets written into stories, who gets dialogue and whose inner lives are considered interesting.

The surprising number of failures

Fans maintain a long-running online database, bechdeltest.com, where users rate films and debate borderline cases. Many versions of the test also add a fourth rule: the two women must have names. That tweak exists because many films include unnamed female characters who exchange a line or two and then vanish.

Analyses of these ratings consistently find that a substantial minority of films fail, including many celebrated ones. Big franchises have been especially prone to it, particularly older ensemble adventures built around a male hero and his friends. Some of the most beloved films of all time struggle to pass, not because their makers set out to exclude women, but because nobody stopped to notice that every important conversation happened between men.

There is also a commercial angle. In 2014, the data journalism site FiveThirtyEight analysed nearly 1,800 films and found that those passing the test did not earn less, and on some measures delivered a better return on their budgets. Whatever else the Bechdel test is, it is not a predictor of box-office failure.

From cartoon to cinema policy

In 2013, a handful of cinemas in Sweden began labelling films with an "A" rating if they passed the test, with support from the Swedish Film Institute. It was a symbolic gesture rather than a rule, and it drew both applause and mockery. Critics pointed out that a box-ticking exercise designed as a joke was not a reliable guide to quality. Supporters replied that this was missing the point: the label existed to make audiences notice a pattern, not to tell them what to watch.

The episode captured the strange position the test now occupies. It is too blunt to be a serious critical tool and too revealing to ignore.

The tests it inspired

The Bechdel test's popularity has encouraged people to design similar checks for other blind spots. A few have become well known.

The Mako Mori test, named after a character in Pacific Rim (2013), was proposed by fans who felt the Bechdel test missed something. It asks whether a film has at least one female character with her own narrative arc that isn't there simply to support a man's story.

The DuVernay test, suggested in 2016 by the critic Manohla Dargis and named after the director Ava DuVernay, asks whether characters of colour have fully realised lives rather than serving as scenery in white stories.

The Riz test, inspired by a speech by the actor Riz Ahmed, looks at how Muslim characters are portrayed, and whether they appear mainly as terrorists, victims or threats.

None of these tests is perfect. All of them share the Bechdel test's main strength: they turn a vague feeling of "something is missing" into a question simple enough to ask about any film.

The criticism worth taking seriously

Some critics argue that the test has done harm by encouraging lazy fixes. A screenwriter can insert a brief exchange between two women about a work problem, tick the box and change nothing about the story's deeper priorities. Others say it rewards quantity over quality, or that it encourages audiences to treat art as a checklist.

Those are fair points, and the best answer is the one Bechdel herself has often given in interviews: the test was a joke about how few options there were, not a formula for good writing. If studios treat it as a target rather than a symptom, they have misunderstood it.

Why it still matters

Stories are one of the main ways we learn what kinds of lives are worth watching. If, film after film, women mostly exist to support, motivate or decorate the journeys of men, audiences absorb that message without ever hearing it said out loud. Children absorb it too.

The Bechdel test endures because it makes that invisible pattern visible in seconds. It doesn't tell you whether a film is good. It tells you whether two women in that film were allowed to have a conversation that wasn't about a man.

The fact that this is still a meaningful question nearly 40 years after a cartoon character first asked it is the real punchline. Try it on the next film you watch. You might be surprised how often you notice it now, and how hard it is to stop noticing.