The Bechdel Test: Analyzing gender disparity in Hollywood
What is the Bechdel test?
The Bechdel test is named after cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who introduced the idea in a comic strip in the year 1985. To pass the test, a story needs to have:
- At least two women
- The women need to talk to each other
- They need to talk to each other about something other than a man
After doing some reading on the Bechdel test, I was struck with inspiration. I decided to conduct data analysis on movie datasets to check whether or not they passed the test!
## The Data Question
My aim was to collect data from various different sources, and answer the following questions about the Bechdel test:
- Have the Bechdel scores of movies improved over the years?
- Do movies with higher IMDB ratings have higher Bechdel scores?
- Do movies with female directors have higher Bechdel scores?
I collected data from three different sources: bechdeltest.com and this movies dataset.
I managed to visualize relationships and answer all the data questions I set out to find answers to.
Some interesting data findings include:
- Movies that fail the Bechdel test tend to have higher IMDB ratings.
- Over the years, there has been an increasing number of movies that pass the Bechdel test.
You can also find a copy of this notebook on Kaggle : https://www.kaggle.com/adhoppin/analyzing-gender-disparity-in-hollywood