The Bechdel test, named after Alison Bechdel, the cartoonist who developed it in 1985, is a way of determining whether or not a movie is hopelessly gender-biased. Specifically, to pass the test of NOT being a film treating women like second-class citizens, the movie must contain at least one scene where 1) there are two or more women 2) who have a conversation with or among each other 3) which includes, even briefly, a topic other than just a man.
Surprisingly, over 50% of all movies fail these criteria, usually either because there are so few female characters that they never have an opportunity talk to another one in the film or because the female characters that are present have vacuous chick-flic feeling-sharing discussions among themselves about the leading male character to the exclusion of everything else.
Some Bechdel examiners have imposed one additional requirement--namely, that the two female characters have to have a large enough role in the film that they are at least each named. This additional imposition prevents a movie from claiming that it passed the test merely because, say, one extra portraying an anonymous female passenger on an airliner exclaims out loud in the presence of another something like "Eek, there are snakes on this plane!"*
Often, movies which pass the test are lower-budget than the ones that fail. Some of the failures include, The Social Network, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II, Avatar, Casablanca, the Star Wars Trilogy, the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Anchorman 2, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Monsters University, and Star Trek Into Darkness. Gravity and The Name of the Rose also failed, but we can forgive those, as in Gravity there are not that many women 200 miles above the earth and The Name of the Rose took place entirely in a cloistered medieval monastery.
In 2013, out of the top-grossing movies, those which passed the test earned about $4.22 billion while those which failed earned only about $2.66 billion. Prior years show the same type of disparity. Maybe Hollywood should realize that well-written scripts which portray non-shallow female actors are more successful than those where the only women shown are obsessed about nothing except men.
The modified Bechdel test (i.e. the one where the female characters have to have names in order to count) is now being applied in Sweden as part of the official rating system of the movies.
*The movie Snakes on a Plane actually passes the test, as it features female flight attendants who discuss topics among themselves other than bedding the captain.
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