Women, the Oscars and the Bechdel Test

Summary

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Podcast Summary: More or Less – "Women, the Oscars and the Bechdel Test"

Date: March 2, 2018
Host: Charlotte MacDonald (BBC Radio 4)
Collaborators: BBC 100 Women Team (Amelia, Sarah, Georgina); Guests: Hannah Anderson, April Raine, Holly Tarquini

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Episode Overview

This episode shines a statistical spotlight on the visibility and representation of women in Hollywood, specifically examining Oscar-winning films through the lens of the Bechdel Test. By analyzing 89 years of Best Picture winners, the episode explores not just if these films feature meaningful interactions between women, but also how much women actually speak on screen, and who gets to tell these stories behind the camera.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Background: Hollywood, Women, and the Oscars

• Context: Hollywood has recently faced scandals about sexism and sexual misconduct (00:20).
• The episode touches on previous coverage of gender pay disparities and the underlying issue: "there are just fewer roles for women." (00:27)

Introducing the Bechdel Test

• What is the Bechdel Test?

  • Three criteria (01:50):
    1. The film has two named female characters.
    2. They have a conversation with each other.
    3. The conversation is about something other than a man.
    • Quote (Amelia, 01:50): "The Bechdel Test is quite straightforward. It asks a film three simple [questions]…"

• Origins: Inspired by cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s 1985 comic strip criticizing the lack of satisfying female characters (01:18).

Testing Oscar-Winning Films

• Method:

  • The team reviews 89 Best Picture winners using data from bechdeltest.com and their own viewings (02:08).

• Judgment challenges:

  • The test seemed like a "low bar" but was surprisingly hard to apply consistently (02:08–03:24).
  • Examples of ambiguity:
    • Do group conversations or singing count?
    • Does a servant talking about a chicken count?
    • Quote (Amelia, 03:29): "One of mine passes because a servant talks about a raised chicken."

• Case studies:

  • Great Expectations (1946): Despite two strong female leads (Miss Havisham and Estella), they never converse with each other; always talking to a male character (03:56).

Results: How Many Oscar Winners Pass?

• Out of 89 Best Picture winners, just over half failed the Bechdel Test (04:44).
• First Pass: "The Broadway Melody" (1929) was the first winner to pass (04:59).
• No Improvement Over Time: No clear trend, and the 1970s were particularly poor for female representation—iconic films like "The Godfather" and "Rocky" failed the test (05:31).
• Recent Winners: Even "A Beautiful Mind," "Spotlight," "Moonlight," and "Slumdog Millionaire" fail the Test (05:39).

Beyond the Bechdel: Who’s Really Talking?

• Script Analysis:

  • BBC’s Hannah Anderson ran scripts to quantify dialogue by gender (06:10).
  • Findings: Of 40 scripts analyzed, only "Terms of Endearment" (1984) had women speaking for at least half the time (06:23).
  • Some films pass the Bechdel simply by a narrow technicality, with women “only speaking for a fraction of the time.” For example, in "Argo" and "Schindler’s List", less than 5% of lines are spoken by women (07:13).

• Notable Quote:

  • "You have this strong female character that will be talking a lot, but a lot of the rest of the dialogue and the rest of the characters are male. So you're sort of blindsided by just this one strong character." (Narrator/Actor, 07:44)

• Gladiator: Only one named female character (Lucilla), who fails the Bechdel Test despite a significant presence (07:14).

This Year's (2018) Oscars: Any Better?

• About a third of that year's nominees failed the Bechdel Test (07:56).

• Most that passed did so on a technicality—"very brief, often not particularly meaningful conversation" (Sarah, 08:06).

• Films like "Lady Bird" are exceptions, but most films with strong female leads are still surrounded by overwhelmingly male casts (08:22).

• Key Insight:

  • The Bechdel Test asks for a “community of women” on screen, not just “outliers” (Sarah, 08:22).

Structural Issues Behind the Camera

• Who Tells the Story?
  • April Raine points out the lack of women directors: Only five women nominated ever for Best Director in 90 years; only one winner—Kathryn Bigelow, whose "The Hurt Locker" fails the Bechdel Test (09:29).
  • Quote (April Raine, 09:29): "So if those are not female eyes, then we're going to get a different story."

The F Rating: New Markers for Female-Led Films

• Guest: Holly Tarquini, creator of the F Rating, which denotes films written or directed by women; if also featuring a strong female cast, it's "triple-rated" (10:06).

  • F Rating now searchable on IMDb (10:34).
  • Quote (Tarquini, 11:11): "I'm really interested in who's telling the story because the main storyteller has so much influence and so much power in filmmaking."

• Shortcoming of the Bechdel Test:

  • Many “very misogynist films pass it.” The test doesn’t reveal who is telling the story—“there’s huge amounts of porn that passes the Bechdel Test.” (Tarquini, 11:34)

Call for Wider Representation

• Goes beyond women—to calls for more representation for ethnic minorities, LGBTQI, and people with disabilities (12:04–12:16).
  • Quote (Unspecified Woman, 12:16): "I believe that representation matters, period. Which means that people who pay their hard-earned money to sit in a darkened theater should have the opportunity to see themselves in fully realized characters..."

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Charlotte MacDonald (03:56): "That just blows my mind that you can have these strong female characters, and yet they're still really only having conversations with men."
• Sarah (08:22): "The thing that's interesting about the Bechdel is it's saying we can't just have outliers. We want to see a community of women. And that's the difference, I think so."
• April Raine (09:29): "In 90 years, only one woman has ever won [Best Director]. So what we see on the screen is... a story told through the eyes of the director."
• Holly Tarquini (11:10): "If those storytellers are always of the same kind... you only get one kind of story."
• Unspecified Woman (12:16): "Representation matters, period. Which means that people who pay their hard-earned money... should have the opportunity to see themselves in fully realized characters..."

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Important Timestamps

• 00:27 – Context on Hollywood's gendered issues: sex scandals, pay gaps
• 01:50–02:08 – Explanation and origins of the Bechdel Test
• 02:53–03:24 – Team discusses challenges in applying Bechdel Test criteria
• 03:56 – "Great Expectations" case study—appearing female leads who never interact
• 04:44–05:39 – Results: Over half of Oscar winners fail Bechdel; no improvement over decades
• 06:10–07:44 – Script analysis: quantifying women’s speaking time; surprising lows
• 08:06–08:50 – This year’s nominees: Technical passes, not substantive ones; need for "community of women"
• 09:21–09:52 – Only five women ever nominated for Best Director, only one win—systemic problems behind the camera
• 10:06–11:34 – The F Rating: Focusing on who is telling the story, not just who appears
• 12:04–12:16 – Call for broader representation—race, sexuality, ability, and more on screen

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Conclusion

While the Bechdel Test reveals a continuing lack of female visibility and agency in Oscar-winning films, the episode makes clear that meaningful progress means changing not just what’s on screen, but who gets to tell those stories. Markers like the F Rating and the push for more diversity behind the camera are crucial steps forward.

For more research and resources, visit BBC 100 Women.

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Transcript

[Narrator/Actor]

Foreign.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. We like to take the world and shine a statistical spotlight onto it. Over the past year, Hollywood has been in the news for negative reasons.

[Holly Tarquini]

The Hollywood sex scandal deepens. Another actress comes forward claiming she was raped by film producer Harvey Weinstein.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

Hollywood female stars and are angry it's not just sex scandals. A year ago, we also covered their dismay at pay, where we pointed out that one of the reasons actresses earn less in Hollywood is because there are just fewer roles for women. This week, it's the 90th year of the Royal Academy Awards, and so we thought we'd ask, how visible are women in film? To do this, More or Less has teamed up with a few others.

[Amelia]

So I'm Amelia.

[Sarah]

I'm Sarah.

[Georgina]

And I'm Georgina.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

They're from a BBC team called 100 Women.

[Georgina]

So we work with women's bloggers around the World Service to tell the stories of women, and every year we release a list of 100 inspirational women that you should know about.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

We decided to look back at 89 years worth of films that won Best Picture and ask, do they pass the Bechdel Test? What is that I hear some of you say? Well, back in 1985, a cartoonist called Alison Bechdel poked fun at the fact that so few films had satisfying female movie characters. In her comic strip, Dykes to Watch out for, she shows two women discussing going to the cinema. One woman explains her rules for picking what she wants to watch, and that forms the basis of what has become the Bechdel Test.

[Amelia]

The Bechdel Test is quite straightforward. It asks a film three simple does that film have two named female characters? Do those two female characters have a conversation with one another? And lastly, is that conversation about something other than a man?

[Charlotte MacDonald]

In Alison's cartoon, the two women go home, there were no films showing that passed. To be honest, this seems like a very low bar. Surely you'd expect most films to pass, wouldn't you? It turned out to be a trickier enterprise to do than we first assumed. We collected a lot of the data from a website called bechdeltest.com but we were still a number of films short, and we decided to watch other nominated films. So the team divided them up to watch them. Who is it?

[Sarah]

Pip man.

[Narrator/Actor]

Pip.

[Sarah]

Mr. Pumblechook's boy.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

And you were right, Mommy. Mr. Kringle is Santa Claus. Would you stop interrupting me while I am interrupting you? We actually encountered lots of problems with judging whether a film passed or not. And we came Together to discuss them.

[Amelia]

I was surprised at how hard some of the decisions were to make. So we kind of had a criteria, which was person A or character A has to speak to character B, Character B has to say something back, and then character A has to reply to that. So there has to be, like, three elements of the conversation as opposed to

[Charlotte MacDonald]

one woman just saying something in passing to another woman.

[Amelia]

Yeah. One of mine had singing in it, and I was like, does singing count? But it kind of didn't count because they were singing to a man, even though it was a group of women singing together.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

Lots of lines. Honestly, that's a pretty poor bar if the only time a woman is saying something is when she's singing.

[Amelia]

You know, one of mine passes because a servant talks about a raised chicken.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

It's not great, is it?

[Georgina]

Yeah. I mean, this morning I was talking about a film called all the King's Men. They do have some. Well, they have one quite strong female character called Sadie. And at one point, she says the. The sentence, I hate all women. When I originally watched it, I gave it a pass. We rewatched it this morning, and we said it's a no because it isn't a conversation. She's actually directing it at a group.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

I mean, one of the ones that really struck me because I watched great expectations from 1946, and this is obviously based on a book and has two really strong female characters, Ms. Havisham and Estella. Now, the thing that really struck me was when I was watching it, that you actually see those two characters on screen all the time. You even see them in the same room frequently, and yet they never talk to each other. There's basically. There's this boy in the room. They're always talking to him and never each other. And it's like. That just blows my mind that you can have these strong female characters, and yet they're still really only having conversations with men. After making our way through and judging some flimsy scenes of women talking, what did we find? Drum roll. Well, out of the 89 Oscar winners for Best Picture, just over half failed. Well, it seems like we're taking an awful chance. This is the first film that passed the Bechdel test, the Broadway melody in 1929. Oh, Queenie.

[Narrator/Actor]

New York.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

The place we've dreamed and talked about. And this is from one of the first scenes of the film. It's about two sisters who go to New York to try to make it big in the entertainment world. But looking at the Best Picture winners in the following decades there's no clear pattern to which films passed or failed. The situation certainly hasn't got better over time. The 1970s were particularly bad with classics like the Godfather, Platoon, Midnight Cowboy, Rocky. What have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully?

[Amelia]

Sometimes I just look at a guy and I know this fellow's not going to make it.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

Even recent winners such as Spotlight, A Beautiful Mind, moonlight and Slumdog Millionaire all fail. What did you expect? But it's not just that so many fail. It's that a lot passed. With just one brief exchange, we decided we wanted to know more. We did a further analysis. How often are women speaking versus men? Hannah Anderson is a software developer at the BBC and ran scripts through a program she co wrote with a friend.

[Narrator/Actor]

We wrote code to calculate how many lines were spoken by each character and then mapped those characters to actors and actresses. And from that we were able to sort of work out how many lines were spoken based on gender.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

We were only able to obtain 40 scripts of Best Picture winners smattered across the 89 years. But of the 40 scripts we looked at, only one film had women talking for at least half of the time. That was Terms of Endearment, which won in 1984. And what it also revealed was that some films technically pass the Bechdel test, but women are only speaking for a fraction of the time. For example, Argo and Schinder's List pass just. But less than 5% of the script is spoken by female characters. One of the films that really surprised me was Shakespeare in Love. It passes the Bechdel test. And as well as winning Best Picture, it won Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress. I will marry Wessex a week from Saturday. Is she fertile?

[Narrator/Actor]

She will breed.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

And yet the script shows that women are only talking for around a quarter of the time. The film Gladiator has one strong female character, Lucilla, the emperor's daughter. Around 15% of the script is spoken by a woman, but it completely fails the Bechdel test. That's because Lucilla is the only female character named in the cast. Even the gladiator's wife is only called Maximus's wife, and she just mainly waves from a distance.

[Narrator/Actor]

You have this strong female character that will be talking a lot, but a lot of the rest of the dialogue and the rest of the characters are male. So you're sort of blindsided by just this one strong character.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

And what about this year, 2018? Around a third of the nominations failed the Bechdel test. My colleague Sarah was Really perplexed when she took a look at them in

[Sarah]

this year's nominations, the ones that pass, most of them, apart from Lady Bird, for obvious reasons, squeak through, you know, again, like I cited on a sort of technicality of a very brief, often not particularly meaningful conversation.

[Unspecified Woman (possibly Georgina or another 100 Women team member)]

But.

[Sarah]

But of those, a lot of them have central main characters. So there's the post, the Shape of Water, Three Billboards or really strong main female leads. But they are kind of outliers and that's what's interesting. So they've got this o arc, but they're surrounded by a sea of men. So I think the thing that's interesting about the Bechdel is it's saying we can't just have outliers. We want to see a community of women. And that's the difference, I think so.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

More than half of the winners of Best Picture do not pass what seems like a pretty simple test. Can you imagine the reverse? A film that doesn't feature two men talking to each other about something unrelated to a woman.

[Unspecified Woman (possibly Georgina or another 100 Women team member)]

It is not surprising at all to me that nearly half of the films that have won Best picture in the 90 year history of the Academy fail the Bechdel test. Because we need to remember who greenlights films, who the directors are.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

This is April Raine. She's senior director of marketing for Fractured Atlas, an organization which supports the arts in the US over a 90 year

[Unspecified Woman (possibly Georgina or another 100 Women team member)]

history, we've only had five women in 90 years who have been nominated for Best director. And in 90 years, only one woman has ever won. So what we see on the screen is a film, a story that is told through the eyes of the director. So if those are not female eyes, then we're going to get a different story.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

Although ironically, on the one occasion that the Oscar for Best Director went to a woman, Catherine Bigelow, her film the Hurt Locker fails the Bechdel test. Despite that, perhaps we should be testing for who is behind the camera.

[Holly Tarquini]

I'm Holly Tarquini. I'm the executive director of Film Bath and the founder of the F rating.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

A few years ago, Holly created the F rating. She wanted a way to highlight for audiences when a film is written or directed by a woman, if it also features a strong female cast, it's triple rated.

[Holly Tarquini]

The F definitely stands for feminist, but lots of people imagine that the F is for female and that's fine that they think that.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

It started at the Bath Film Festival in England, which she runs, but it spread.

[Holly Tarquini]

When we first launched it, it was only to rate the films at Bath Film festival. It wasn't intended as something which was going to receive a lot of international attention. And now There are over 60 other organizations who use the F rating to highlight films. In 2017, the keyword F rated and triple F rated was added to IMDb, which means that you can now search IMDb for F rated titles. And that's brilliant because it shows you what a massive range of films there are. And I hope that part of what will happen is people will proactively choose to go and see films directed and written by women, and that the F rating will help them to easily find those films. What's really difficult about the Bechdel test is that lots of very misogynist films pass it. It doesn't tell you anything about who's telling the story. There's huge amounts of porn that passes the Bechdel test, so it doesn't really tell you what's going on on screen. I'm really interested in who's telling the story because the main storyteller has so much influence and so much power in filmmaking. And if those storytellers are always of the same kind, if they're always white, middle aged, heterosexual, cisgendered middle class American men, you only get one kind of story.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

And this doesn't just go for women. There have also been calls to make Hollywood films more diverse in general, more ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, or from the LGBTQI community.

[Unspecified Woman (possibly Georgina or another 100 Women team member)]

I believe that representation matters, period. Which means that people who pay their hard earned money to sit in a darkened theater should have the opportunity to see themselves in fully realized characters on the big screen. Not just during award season, but all year long.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

That's all we have time for this week, but find out more about our research by going to BBC.co.uk hundredwomen and try the quiz to test your knowledge of what films do and don't pass the Bechdel test. If you have a stats question, email moreorlessbc.co.uk or tweet @BBC more or less this program was presented and Produced by Charlotte MacDonald with help from Lizzie McNeil and 100 women. The token men were sound engineer Rod Farker and the editor Richard Varden.