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

To facilitate discussion of gender issues in media such as film, it is useful to develop quantitative measures which can be applied to a film corpus. In order to scale to large film corpora, ideally we seek measures which are not labour-intensive to apply. A simple test popularised by Alison Bechdel is a lightweight way to probe women’s representation in a film, and we use this as the basis of a quantitative measure. However, the original test is gender-asymmetric, which compli- cates hypothesis testing. We describe a symmetrised version of the test, and use it to analyse a corpus of films from the year 2006, studying the output of the US “Big 6” major companies as well as a sample of popular “indie” companies. We find strong evidence for gender imbalance as measured by the test, and no difference in this respect between major and indie companies. We discuss the usefulness and statisti- cal power of the symmetrised Bechdel test and the derived Bechdel coefficient.