Quantifying the Bechdel test of gender representation in major and independent film

To facilitate discussion of gender issues in media suchas film, it is useful to develop quantitative measureswhich can be applied to a film corpus. In order toscale to large film corpora, ideally we seek measureswhich are not labour-intensive to apply. A simple testpopularised by Alison Bechdel is a lightweight way toprobe women’s representation in a film, and we usethis as the basis of a quantitative measure. However,the original test is gender-asymmetric, which compli-cates hypothesis testing. We describe a symmetrisedversion of the test, and use it to analyse a corpus offilms from the year 2006, studying the output of theUS “Big 6” major companies as well as a sample ofpopular “indie” companies. We find strong evidencefor gender imbalance as measured by the test, andno difference in this respect between major and indiecompanies. We discuss the usefulness and statisti-cal power of the symmetrised Bechdel test and thederived Bechdel coefficient.