Bechdel test is a simple measure of female representation in fiction — does it have two named women who talk to each other about something other than a man?.
The Bechdel test (sometimes Bechdel-Wallace test) was articulated in a 1985 strip of Alison Bechdel's comic 'Dykes to Watch Out For', in which a character explains she only watches a film if it contains at least two women, who talk to each other, about something other than a man. Bechdel credited the rule to her friend Liz Wallace. Designed as a joke about an absence the medium had stopped noticing, the test became a serious instrument of film criticism in the 2000s as databases of films passing or failing it began to circulate online. Studies have found that a striking proportion of mainstream Hollywood releases — including several Best Picture winners — fail. The test does not measure quality, feminism, or even representation in any sophisticated sense; a film can pass with a thirty-second exchange and be otherwise misogynistic. Its value is diagnostic. It exposes how rarely the camera lets women be in a room together, doing anything other than reacting to men.