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The test is named after the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, in whose 1985 comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For the test first appeared. Bechdel credited the idea to her friend Liz Wallace and the writings of Virginia Woolf. Originally meant as “a little lesbian joke in an alternative feminist newspaper”, according to Bechdel, the test became more widely discussed in the 2000s, as a number of variants and tests inspired by it emerged.
See also: tvtropes



There are some movies with a very small cast in a specific situation where failing the test makes sense. A survival story where there are two characters that interact would fail if both of them weren’t women, but that could be a solid movie.
But any movie with more than a few characters will most likely have a cast large enough where there should be plenty of situations for women or girls to talk to each other about something other than men. The test is a great way to look at movies as an aggregate, so we can ask ourselves why movies tend to be focused so much on men that a script can’t be written with characters that are female and have something to discuss that doesn’t involve men.
The reason of course is the imbalance on the number of scriptwriters, number of directors, and projects lead by women that are greenlit which should be a narrowing gap over time as we overcome the inertia of already connected people continuing to get more work. The gap should be narrowing a lot faster than it is.