The Bechdel Test

Writing Blog

The Bechdel test or the Bechdel-Wallace test is a measure of how women are represented in works of fiction. The test seeks to identify whether women converse about anything other than men.

The test has three criteria:

  1. There must be at least two named women
  2. These two women must talk to each other
  3. And lastly, this conversation must be about something other than a man.

It usually refers to films but can extend to any work of fiction such as books, especially as many books do become films. I have never conducted this test on a book I have read or a film I have watched, but being a woman, I am certain I would be attuned to identifying fiction books that contain gender inequality if there are named women present in the story. I thought that only a minority of books would not pass this test. I was wrong. Surprisingly, a large number of books do not pass the test. These include:

  • The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
  • The Time Traveller’s wife by Audrey Niffenegger
  • Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James
  • The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Books that pass the Bechdel test include:

  • Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin
  • The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  • Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
  • Middlemarch by George Eliot
  • Little Fires Everywhere by Celste Ng
  • Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
  • Beloved by Toni Morrison
  • Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
  • Divergent by Veronica Roth.

Of course, the lack of female representation doesn’t necessarily make a story any less enjoyable or brilliant, but it is an interesting facet, to understand the prevailing trends in society overall.

As Virginia Woolf states:

“in fiction, woman characters are “almost without exception… shown in their relation to men… And how small a part of a woman’s life is that.”

Clare Fallon: 12 Amazing Books that Pass the Bechdal Test, Huffpost

There is no accurate data on the percentage of books that do not pass the Bechdel Test, but around 50% of Hollywood films since the mid-1990s have failed!  

Surprisingly,

“in 2016, a third of the top 50 films at the box office did not feature female characters talking to each other in any meaningful way.”

Shannon Liao: We can do better than The Bechdel Test, The Verge

Imagine that! Especially considering:

“It’s a low bar, the female characters don’t have to have power, or purpose, or buck gender stereotypes.”

Robin Smith: Sizing Up Hollywoord’s Gender Gap, Duke Research Blog. Research by FiveThirtyEight

Even worse:

Films can pass with a single line of dialogue… That fact makes it perhaps even more surprising that so many films still fail to pass this low bar.”

Alyssa Rosenberg: In 2019, it’s time to move beyond the Bechdel test, Washington Post. Research complied by Creative Artist Agency and Shift7

Of greater concern is the fact that this test only relates to female representation in films. I am sure the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities and people of colour, receive far less exposure and are portrayed in line with stereotypes also.

The reason why this is such an issue? If you flipped the criteria around and applied them to men, then there are far less books which contain this lack of disproportional representation of men in works of fiction. I wonder why that is? Perhaps, it’s because men are not always talking about women all the time 😉

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