Real women are still missing from the movies — the Bechdel Test proves it

The next time you watch a movie, try asking yourself these three questions: Does it feature at least two women? Who talk to each other? About something other than a man?

That simple metric, which is known as the Bechdel Test and first surfaced nearly 40 years ago, reveals a lot about Hollywood’s representation of women onscreen. And in the hot-pink wake of “Barbie,” it’s seeing a resurgence.

On International Women’s Day, Alamo Drafthouse Seaport joined the chain’s other cinemas across the country in handing out limited-edition Bechdel Test scorecards to moviegoers, who were invited to grade their favorite film — pass or fail. Meanwhile, subscribers to Max, the streaming home of HBO, could choose from a menu of movies touted for “Acing the Bechdel Test” and featuring releases like “Legally Blonde,” “The Bling Ring,” “Evil Dead Rise,” and “My Neighbor Totoro.”

No one is more amazed by the test’s endurance than its accidental creator, cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who introduced the concept in a 1985 episode of her comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For.” In that episode, “The Rule,” two women pass by a movie theater advertising testosterone-fueled fare. “I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements,” one friend tells the other, before laying out her formula.

Bechdel, who was living in New York City at the time, says she “ripped off” the concept from her friend Liz Wallace, who explained it one day while they were changing after karate class. “I had a comic strip due, like, the next day, and I remembered it,” Bechdel said, speaking from her Vermont studio by Zoom. “It was very easy to remember.”

It was also “sort of a joke,” she said, noting her partner doesn’t like it when she says that. “It’s very serious stuff, but I think maybe the reason it did get a cultural purchase is because it comes at it from this humorous angle — and that’s just more palatable for people.”

Bechdel has long been ambivalent about the Bechdel Test (also known as the Bechdel-Wallace Test), which got “a second life on the internet when film students started talking about it” in the 2000s, as she explained on her website. The test has spawned a user-edited database of 10,000-plus movies as well as countless conversations, variants, memes. It even has its own Merriam-Webster dictionary definition.

On Oscars night March 10, the writer and feminist Rebecca Solnit tweeted that Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” — which swept the awards with seven wins — not only “nuked” the Bechdel Test but “disappeared the great physicist Lise Meitner, she who first comprehended that atoms could be and had been split.”

Other frequently cited Bechdel Test fails: “Casablanca,” “Star Wars,” “Back to the Future,” “Reservoir Dogs,” “Avatar,” “The Social Network,” “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “The Avengers,” “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and the entire “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

Famous passes: “Alien,” “Thelma & Louise,” “Frozen,” and “Hidden Figures.” Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” not only aced the Bechdel Test, it flipped the script on stereotypical gender roles and subverted the male gaze: “Barbie has a great day every day, but Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him,” goes Helen Mirren’s narration.

Other movies expose the test’s limits (see sidebar). Bechdel is the first to admit many movies could “superficially pass the Bechdel Test” without “creating three-dimensional female characters or giving them agency.” Conversely, a film like Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking” nearly tanks: Yes, a community of women and girls are talking to each other, about the men they’re trying to escape.

In other words, don’t take the test too literally — but don’t tear up that mental scorecard, either. According to the University of Southern California Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s recent annual report, only 30 of the 100 highest-grossing movies last year featured a girl or woman in a leading or co-leading role, marking a sharp drop from 2022 (with 44 films). Even factoring in the 2023 Hollywood strikes, “this is an industry failure,” says the report’s coauthor Stacy L. Smith, rewinding women’s representation in film back to 2010 levels.

Once a wrinkle appears on a woman’s face, her chances sink. Not counting ensemble films like “80 for Brady” and “Book Club: The Next Chapter,” only three top-grossing movies last year featured a woman age 45 or older as a lead or co-lead, while 10 times as many (32) films featured a man in the same age bracket (overwhelmingly, they were white men — hello, Bradley Cooper, Cillian Murphy, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise). Salma Hayek was the lone woman of color over 45 to lead or co-lead a movie — about a male stripper — “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.”

The Bechdel Test continues to be “a very useful tool to highlight the poor representation of female characters,” said Martha M. Lauzen, founder and executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.

As for behind-the-scenes roles, the picture isn’t much better. Despite topping the 2023 box office at $1.4 billion globally, Lauzen says in her annual “Celluloid Ceiling” report, Gerwig’s success with “Barbie” was “the ultimate illusion,” considering how dramatically underrepresented women are as directors, and in other key positions. Across the 250 highest-grossing movies of last year, women accounted for only 16 percent of directors, 17 percent of writers, 21 percent of editors, and 7 percent of cinematographers. But when there was at least one female director on a movie, “substantially more women” were hired for those jobs.

“There’s an idea that women are afraid of other women, and I think that’s because so many times we’ve been told there’s only room for one of us at the table,” said Gillian Robespierre, who frequently collaborates with Milton’s Jenny Slate (Robespierre directed Slate in “Obvious Child,” “Landline,” and her new comedy special, “Seasoned Professional”). “At least in my circle of filmmaker friends, we do actually help each other” and share notes about everything from scripts and actors to agents and “money — how much you make, how much you ask for.”

She’s currently adapting Laura Zigman’s novel “Separation Anxiety,” about a 50-year-old Cambridge mother and wife whose life is falling apart — maybe a tough pitch, but so was “Obvious Child,” Robespierre’s “romantic comedy” about abortion. “The thing is, I did not ask for permission to make that film,” she said. “I didn’t pitch that film. I didn’t go and do the water-bottle tour — because no one would serve me water.” Robespierre and her producing and writing partner, Elisabeth Holm, raised the money to finance it on their own.

Lauzen started collecting data on women’s underrepresentation and employment in film and television in the late 1990s. Once in a while, an article would come out saying “things had never been better for women in Hollywood,” she recalled. But she suspected the data would tell a different story — and it did. What she didn’t realize was “how difficult it would be to create change.”

“I haven’t thought about the Bechdel Test in a really long time,” says director Angela Robinson, whose feature “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women,” set at Harvard, also aces the test. “It was everywhere, and then it kind of went away.”

But the #MeToo movement, which exposed sexual abuse and harassment in Hollywood, also made sexism mainstream news.

“Over the last five years, there was a big wave about inclusion, and female filmmakers, and looking at parity,” Robinson said. “I often call these things ‘punching the blob’ . . . you punch and you punch — and you see it moving, but then it slowly just re-forms.”

“Being a woman of color, you get a very earnest ‘we’re interested in your vision and your voice’” message, she said of the path to Hollywood. But the reality of Hollywood is that “it’s business,” and “if you’re there, taking the job, then that means there’s probably a white dude who doesn’t get the job … and people aren’t necessarily going to be happy about that.”

And not everyone wants to see traditional roles challenged. Boston native Frankie Shaw created the semi-autobiographical Showtime series “SMILF,” in which she played a struggling single mom in Southie. “It was a rallying cry for working-class mothers,” she said, “but some people were so pissed at seeing how imperfect she was.”

The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media provides a script-analysis system, Spellcheck for Bias, which uses a text-analysis tool and social-science research to identify biases and stereotypes as well as opportunities in six areas (gender, race, LGBTQIA+ identity, disability, age, and body type).

As a result of such tools, says Madeline Di Nonno, the institute’s CEO, major industry partners have changed scripts to better reflect the world in which we live. “It’s easier to fix things on the front end than on the back end,” she said.

Long before Bechdel’s test or the bias spellcheck, someone else noted the characters who got to speak and have full lives in works of fiction — and those who didn’t.

Her name? Virginia Woolf.

In her 1929 essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf wrote that women were rarely represented as friends. Instead, “almost without exception” they were “shown in their relation to men.”

Bechdel now believes Wallace, the friend she ripped off, ripped off the concept from Woolf. Four decades later, the concept continues to inspire riffs, copycats, variants, and spoofs — like the Sexy Lamp Test. “If you can remove a female character from your plot and replace her with a sexy lamp and your story still works,” explains writer Kelly Sue DeConnick, “you’re a hack.”

Bechdel is a fan of a recently created Bechdel-like test for climate change, which asks whether a film acknowledges that climate change exists, and whether any characters know it.

“It’s been sort of amusing to me,” the cartoonist said, “just to see how culture happens — to see how this old piece of lesbian, feminist, I-don’t-know-what-you-would-even-call-it . . . how that, over decades, got morphed into something really substantive and informative that people are talking about.

That’s really cool.”

Brooke Hauser can be reached at brooke.hauser@globe.com. Follow her @brookehauser.