We’ve written about the Bechdel test on this blog before. To pass this simple test of gender bias, a movie, TV show, or novel must simply have 1) two named female characters who 2) talk to each other 3) about something other than a man.
The test has been around for a while, but I can’t think of a time when it’s been given as robust a statistical analysis as it received recently from Walt Hickey, writing for Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight. Crunching the numbers from movies from as long ago as 1970 to today, Hickey finds that the number of movies that pass the test have been steadily climbing since the 70s, but have stayed flat at about 50% for the last 20 years. Not great, especially when you consider that if you reversed the test and looked for movies where men spoke to men about something other than a woman, that number would approach 100%.
Things get really interesting when Hickey turns his attention to the return-on-investment of movies that don’t pass versus movies that do. On this question, Hickey discovered, firstly, that Hollywood doesn’t invest as much money in movies that pass the Bechdel test: the median budget for movies that do pass the test is lower than the budget for those that don’t by more than $15 million. As for why this should be the case, Hickey offers the following explanation:
To find out why films involving women in meaningful roles were getting less funding than movies that sidelined them, I reached out to several Hollywood producers, journalists and entrepreneurs. They pointed to the scant numbers of women in writing, directing, producing and financing roles in Hollywood; the fact that foreign pre-sales are crucial in paying for the vast majority of films and the belief, among investors, that movies featuring women do not “travel” well internationally; and the persistent assumption that American audiences are more likely to prefer male-anchored films, especially in the lucrative action genre.
Of course, we all know anecdotally from recent counterexamples like The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Frozen that the Hollywood bias against movies featuring women is unfounded. Now we know it statistically as well. According to Hickey’s analysis, films that don’t pass the Bechdel test fare no better than films that do, either domestically or internationally—and when the slightly lower budgets of the films that pass the Bechdel test are taken into account, those movies turn out to have a significantly higher return on investment.
Statistical analyses on these issues of equality and representation are powerful. It’s one thing to say, based on anecdote or experience, that Hollywood is biased against women—it’s quite another to see the data laid out to back up that claim, and to see clearly that the often-cited reasons for these biases are unfounded.
Maybe, with some real data in front of them, Hollywood will start listening to what audiences have been telling them all along: make more movies with fully realized female characters.
