Bechdel credited the idea to her friend Liz Wallace and the writings of Virginia Woolf. The test is named after the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, in whose 1985 comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For the test first appeared.
Media industry studies indicate that films that pass the test perform better financially than those that do not. Rather, the test is used as an indicator for the active presence of women in the entire field of film and other fiction, and to call attention to gender inequality in fiction. Passing or failing the test is not necessarily indicative of how well women are represented in any specific work. Īccording to user-edited databases and the media industry press, about half of all films meet these criteria. The requirement that the two women be named is sometimes added. It asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The Bechdel test ( / ˈ b ɛ k d əl/ BEK-dəl) is a measure of the representation of women in fiction. The test is created by and named after the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel.
