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.