It Started as a Joke in a Lesbian Comic Strip. Then Hollywood Had to Take It Seriously

The strip appeared in 1985, in a two-page comic called Dykes to Watch Out For that ran in gay and lesbian newspapers. The readership was small. The author, Alison Bechdel, described what she put in it as "a little lesbian joke in an alternative feminist newspaper." The strip was titled "The Rule." It showed two women discussing whether to see a film, with one explaining the criteria she used to decide.

The rule had three parts. The film had to have at least two women in it. Those two women had to talk to each other. And their conversation had to be about something other than a man.

The punchline was that the last film the character had seen that met those requirements was Alien — released six years earlier, in 1979. They went home instead.

Forty years later, that joke is a named metric in the Oxford English Dictionary, a formal submission requirement for the European cinema fund Eurimages, a rating category used by Swedish cinemas, and a standard referenced in academic journals, film industry reports, and Hollywood pitch meetings. The strip that produced it has been out of print for decades. Most people who use the test have never read it.

Where It Actually Came From

Alison Bechdel began publishing Dykes to Watch Out For in 1983 in gay and lesbian alternative publications. The strip followed a cast of mostly queer characters through their daily lives, friendships, and engagement with politics and culture. It ran for twenty-five years, until 2008. Bechdel later became more widely known for her 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical when it was adapted for the stage in 2015.

The idea for "The Rule" was not originally Bechdel's. In interviews, she has consistently credited it to her friend Liz Wallace — a karate training partner who had told Bechdel she applied those criteria when deciding which films to watch. Bechdel acknowledged this directly in the original strip, printing the words "with thanks to Liz Wallace" beneath the title and placing Wallace's name on the cinema marquee visible in the background. For this reason, Bechdel herself prefers that the test be called the Bechdel-Wallace test — a preference she has expressed publicly and repeatedly, including in a 2015 interview on NPR's Fresh Air, where she described feeling "a little bit sheepish" about the attribution given that the idea was not hers to begin with.

Wallace, in turn, had been influenced by Virginia Woolf. In her 1929 essay A Room of One's Own — the same essay we have already discussed in these pages — Woolf had observed that in the fiction she read, she rarely encountered women represented as friends, existing in relationships with each other rather than only in relation to men. The line of intellectual descent from Woolf's 1929 Cambridge lectures to Wallace's personal movie rule to Bechdel's 1985 comic strip to the Swedish cinema rating system of 2013 is, in retrospect, remarkably direct.

Twenty Years of Obscurity — Then the Internet

The strip appeared in 1985 and was largely forgotten for two decades. It was reprinted in the first collected edition of Dykes to Watch Out For, published by Firebrand Books in 1986, and read by the small audience that followed Bechdel's work. Outside that readership it did not circulate.

In August 2005, Bechdel posted to her blog about a discussion she had discovered on feminist websites. A film-going concept from an old strip — incorrectly attributed to her character Mo, who had not appeared in the comic until 1987 — was being discussed under the name "the Mo Movie Measure." Bechdel corrected the attribution, noted the idea had come from Liz Wallace, and reprinted the original strip.

In the comments beneath that post, a reader named _swallow wrote: "I took the meme to college, where my friends now say, 'That movie didn't pass the Alison Bechdel test.'" That comment — documented by the word history site Wordorigins.org — appears to be the first recorded use of the phrase "Bechdel test" in print. The name spread from there.

By 2008, Google Trends data showed the first significant spike in searches for the term. By 2013, The Daily Dot described it as "almost a household phrase, common shorthand to capture whether a film is woman-friendly." In June 2018, the Oxford English Dictionary added "Bechdel test" as a formal entry. The joke from the alternative lesbian newspaper had become a dictionary definition.

What the Data Actually Showed

As the test spread into critical discourse, a database was built. BechdelTest.com — a user-compiled archive of crowd-sourced film ratings — accumulated tens of thousands of entries, with registered users submitting and debating the pass or fail status of films across cinema history. The oldest film in the database to pass the test is Georges Méliès's silent film Cinderella, made in 1899.

In April 2014, the data journalism website FiveThirtyEight published a statistical analysis using that database alongside box office figures. The analysis covered 1,794 films released between 1970 and 2013. The findings were striking — not because they confirmed what people assumed about representation, but because they contradicted what Hollywood had been using to justify its funding decisions.

The common belief among Hollywood producers, documented in FiveThirtyEight's reporting, was that films featuring women prominently did worse at the box office than films that did not. The data did not support this. Films that passed the Bechdel test returned a median of $2.68 for every dollar spent. Films that failed the test returned $2.45 for every dollar spent. Passing films outperformed failing films by return on investment — the metric investors care most about — and the advantage held when controlling for budget and genre.

What the data also showed was that passing films received significantly lower budgets than failing films — a median 35 percent lower for films released between 1990 and 2013. Films featuring women in substantive roles were, on average, allocated considerably less money to make. They then outperformed the better-funded films that had sidelined women. FiveThirtyEight's Walt Hickey described the test as "the best test on gender equity in film we have" and "the only test we have data on."

What Hollywood Did When It Found Out

The institutional response to the test's spread was uneven, cautious, and in some cases formally significant.

In 2013, four Swedish cinemas and the Scandinavian cable television channel Viasat Film began incorporating the Bechdel test into their ratings systems — displaying whether a film passed or failed alongside conventional ratings information. The Swedish Film Institute expressed support for the move. It was the first time a public institution had attached the test to a formal exhibition system.

In 2014, the European cinema fund Eurimages incorporated the Bechdel test into its project submission mechanism as part of an information-gathering effort on gender equality, requiring a Bechdel analysis of submitted scripts from its script readers. The test had moved from critical discussion into formal institutional process.

Hollywood's response was more diffuse and harder to document precisely. No major studio adopted the test as a formal production criterion. But the vocabulary it introduced — the idea that films could be evaluated on whether women in them existed in relation to each other rather than only in relation to men — became part of the standard language of pitch meetings, script notes, and awards season criticism through the 2010s. Films failing the test began to attract specific media coverage identifying the failure by name. The failure of Pacific Rim in 2013, for instance, was addressed in detail across entertainment media, with the test cited explicitly.

What the Test Does Not Measure — and Why That Matters

Both Bechdel and the critics who followed the test's spread have been consistent about its limitations. Star Wars fails. So does Casablanca, The Godfather, and Saving Private Ryan. American Hustle passes because two women exchange a few words about nail polish. A film can fail the test and be genuinely feminist in its construction. A film can pass it and be regressive in every meaningful dimension.

Andi Zeisler, writing about the test's cultural ubiquity, identified the problem precisely: the test's utility had been elevated far beyond its original intention. Where Bechdel and Wallace had expressed it as a way to point out the rote, unthinking plotlines of mainstream film, passing the test had become synonymous in public discourse with being feminist. That was never the intent and is not what the test demonstrates.

Several successor tests have been proposed in response to the limitations the Bechdel test's spread made visible. The DuVernay Test — named after director Ava DuVernay — asks whether Black characters have fully realised lives rather than serving as props in white stories. The Mako Mori Test, named after a character in Pacific Rim whose complex arc nonetheless failed to produce a passing Bechdel rating, asks whether a female character has a narrative arc that does not exist solely to support a male character's story. The Sexy Lamp Test, proposed by writer Kelly Sue DeConnick, asks simply whether a female character could be removed from the plot and replaced with a lamp without any loss to the story. Each test was an attempt to measure something the Bechdel test did not reach.

The test's most significant contribution may not be the individual pass or fail ratings it produces. It is the reflex it trained — the habit of asking, when watching a film, whether the women on screen exist in relation to each other or only in relation to men. That question, once asked, is difficult to stop asking. Which is, presumably, exactly what Liz Wallace intended when she told her friend about her rule, somewhere around 1985, before either of them knew what would eventually be done with it.