The Bechdel Test
The Bechdel test, also known as the Bechdel–Wallace test, is a measure of the representation of women in film and other fiction. It has become one of the most widely used frameworks for evaluating gender representation in media. The Pass/Fail version of the Men in Media test is modeled after the Bechdel-Wallace test's format.
The Bechdel test is named after the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel. It asks whether a work features:
1. at least two named women
2. who have a conversation
3. about something other than a man.
The Bechdel Test originated in Alison Bechdel’s 1985 comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. In the strip, a character says she only watches a movie if it satisfies three requirements: it has at least two women in it, they talk to each other, and they talk about something other than a man.
What started as a humorous observation became a widely adopted tool for evaluating gender representation in film and television. The test’s simplicity is both its strength and its limitation — it sets an extremely low bar, yet a surprising number of popular films still fail to meet it. The point of the Bechdel test is not whether individual films pass or fail, but examining the trend over major masses of media.
The MIM (Men in Media) test draws inspiration from the Bechdel Test’s approach while focusing specifically on how masculinity is portrayed. Rather than just a simple pass/fail, the MIM test also evaluates media across multiple dimensions of masculine behavior.