The Bechdel test is a commonly used tool to measure women’s representation in film. To pass the Bechdel test, a film must simply have a scene in which two women (some versions of the test stipulate they must be named) have a conversation about something other than a man. It’s a very small metric, yet many modern films still fail to meet this requirement. The Bechdel test is a great starting point when it comes to discussing representation of women in media, but it can’t be the end of that discussion; women’s representation and the discussions around it are much more nuanced.
The Bechdel test, while flawed, is a great way to open discussions about women’s representation in film. It calls attention to inequities by quantifying the lack of women’s representation. According to the Bechdel Test Movie List, a user-edited database that catalogs which releases pass and fail the Bechdel test, about 44 percent of films released in 2025 failed the Bechdel test. While a majority of the films passed, the amount that failed is too significant. The beauty of the Bechdel test is that it highlights inequities simply and gives people a way to articulate them. “(The Bechdel test) gave me the language to explain the difficulty I had in engaging with films where women did not have a significant presence,” Angela Coppola, a Berkeley High School World of Media teacher, said.
That said, discussion of women’s representation can’t start and end with the Bechdel test. “The Bechdel test gives us the right questions to ask, but there’s never a universal tool to help us answer those questions,” Keldon Clegg, a vice principal at BHS, said. When discourse treats the Bechdel test as both the question and the answer, the discussion becomes incredibly limited. Representation should be treated with more nuance. People must look at individual films on a deeper level to truly understand what it means to successfully represent women.
Ultimately, the Bechdel test can quantify women’s representation, but it fails to measure the quality of that representation. “It’s useful in holding the film industry to account for its lack of female representation. However … it doesn’t measure whether a film is good,” Coppola said. When the Bechdel test is treated as a measure of success for an individual film, people don’t take the time to actually consider what constitutes good representation. “People … use it as a way of seeing if something (is) feminist or not,” Clegg said. This is a problem because the Bechdel test doesn’t actually tell the viewer that much about how women are portrayed in any given film. A film’s portrayal of women doesn’t have to center men to be misogynistic; it could still rely on gender stereotypes or lack depth. On the flip side, a film could still have quality, fleshed-out female characters without necessarily meeting all of the Bechdel test’s requirements. That’s not to say passing the Bechdel test means nothing, but it can’t be the only standard for measuring women’s representation.
Films — and media in general — should strive to portray a wide variety of women’s experiences. If all films that pass the Bechdel test are about the same types of women, then women still aren’t being properly represented. Diversity is incredibly important, as is representing intersectionality.
Data from the company Gracenote found that movies that passed the Bechdel test made more money at the box office, as did female-led films. This makes it clear that people want broader, more diverse representation, and if film companies want more profit, they need to respond accordingly. “Women are not a niche audience, we’re more than half the population, and should be treated as such,” Coppola said.
Overall, the Bechdel test is a helpful tool for looking at trends and patterns in women’s representation in mainstream media. It can help quantify and clarify inequities. However, it shouldn’t be used to judge whether any one film is considered feminist or portrays women accurately. Discussions of the portrayal of women need to be more nuanced, and movie studios need to respond to audiences’ desire for better representation.