A movie is said to satisfy the Bechdel Test if it satisfies the following three criteria:
- The movie has at least two named female characters
- ... who have a conversation with each other
- ... about something other than a man
The website BechdelTest.com scores movies accordingly, granting one point for each of the criteria above for a maximum of three points. The recent Wonder Woman movie scores the full three points (Diana and her mother discuss war, for example), while Dunkirk, which features no named female characters, gets zero. (It was still a great film, however.)
The website also offers an API, which enabled data and analytics director Austin Wehrwein to create this time series chart of Bechdel scores for movies listed on BechdelTest.com:
This chart only includes ratings for that subset of movies listed on Bechdeltest.com, so it's not clear whether this is representative of movies as a whole. Austin suggests combining these data with the broader data from IDMB, so maybe someone wants to give that a try. Austin's R code for generating the above chart and several others is available at the link below, so click through for the full analysis.
Austin Wehrwein: A quick look at Bechdel test data (& an awtools update) (via Mara Averick)