The Bechdel Test
As a fan of movies, there's a good chance you've heard of the Bechdel Test by now. The deceptively simple three-question checklist has become shorthand for talking about how women show up in film. A film passes the test if (1) it has at least two named women, and (2) they talk to each other, and (3) that is conversation about something other than a man.
Passing the Bechdel Test doesn't make a movie good, and failing it doesn't make a movie sexist. Some of the most acclaimed, thoughtful films of all time fail it outright, often just because of how a story happens to be structured. For instance, Gravity is focused on a strong, accomplished female character, but she's floating in space alone. And it's also not a measure of how "feminist" a film is; a movie can clear the bar with a throwaway ten-second exchange about the weather.
So, it might be blunt and imperfect, but the Bechdel Test has persisted as a way to understand female representation on screen, because of how easy it is to apply. It doesn't tell you everything, but zoomed out across hundreds or thousands of films, it starts to say something real about which stories get told and how.
At Criticker, there are two collaborative collections focused around the Bechdel Test:
- Passed the Bechdel Test — films where women get to talk to each other about something other than a man.
- Failed the Reverse Bechdel Test — flips the test around (two named men, talking to each other, about something other than a woman). These are the films that don't clear that bar. It's a nice complementary check on the same idea from the other direction.
Curious how this plays out in practice, we ran the test against our current top 10 trending titles on Criticker. The results: only 4 out of 10 passed.
✅ Passed - Disclosure Day, Toy Story 5, The Sheep Detectives, Supergirl
❌ Failed - Obsession, Backrooms, Project Hail Mary, Masters of the Universe, The Furious, Hokum
A quick glance at that last list makes clear that passing or failing is not an indicator of the film's quality. But we think it's a fun thing to notice. Check out the full collections, or peruse the lists at BechdelTest.com and see how your own favorites stack up.
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