Your Bechdel Score

How well are women represented in the movies you like to watch?

What is the Bechdel Test?

The Bechdel Test is a measure of the representation of women in movies and has three components, which our visualization maps as:

  1. The film does not pass the Bechdel Test.
  2. The film contains at least two named women.
  3. These women have a conversation on screen.
  4. The conversation is about something other than a man.

A list of fifty recent movies is visualized to your left, but you should put in your favorites in to see what's going on! Don't forget to right-click for more.

Your Movies

    How do your favorite movies compare to the following genres?

    Note that the movies displayed here are necessarily from a subset of all movies made.

    Did your favorite movie pass?

    The Bechdel Test originated from this comic to your right, in which cartoonist Alison Bechdel recounts an encounter with her friend Liz Wallace. You might have been surprised to see that a lot of movies don't pass the Bechdel Test – for how simple of a test it is, many movies trip up on its tiered structure, sometimes even struggling to clear the first bar.

    However, a movie failing to pass the Bechdel Test doesn't mean the end of the world. It's only one metric, and there are countless others that can be explored, like in this FiveThirtyEight article. It's a little unfair to denounce a particular movie for failing the test, but the overall trends regarding the Bechdel Test do indicate that film industry has ways to go with fair representation.

    We used the FiveThirtyEight dataset as well as the general Bechdel Test dataset, and much of our work was inspired by this Observable notebook. Other sources of inspiration and interesting things we discovered along the way are listed below: