That test always seemed odd to me. Anytime a woman on a book/movie,/media in general is shown going to a grocery/super market they have whole entire conversations were a man isn’t the subject. Doubly so if their lady’s name is Karen.
I think the criteria is that both women talking need to be named. The point being that if the same rules were applied to men in film, it would be easy for everything to pass, but when applied to women, unfortunately it’s difficult for many films to pass the criteria, or require a lot of scrutiny.
It’s not a rigorous nor formal test of quality, but a simple indicator of representation. Per wikipedia,
A work of fiction passing or failing the test does not necessarily indicate the overall representation of women in the work. Instead, the test is used as an indicator of the active presence (or lack thereof) of women in fiction, and to call attention to gender inequality in fiction.
It wasn’t ever intended to be a mainstay of lit crit, but it’s turned out to be an extremely useful yet quick and simple test, so it’s stuck around in the toolkit.
That test always seemed odd to me. Anytime a woman on a book/movie,/media in general is shown going to a grocery/super market they have whole entire conversations were a man isn’t the subject. Doubly so if their lady’s name is Karen.
I think the criteria is that both women talking need to be named. The point being that if the same rules were applied to men in film, it would be easy for everything to pass, but when applied to women, unfortunately it’s difficult for many films to pass the criteria, or require a lot of scrutiny.
It’s not a rigorous nor formal test of quality, but a simple indicator of representation. Per wikipedia,
It wasn’t ever intended to be a mainstay of lit crit, but it’s turned out to be an extremely useful yet quick and simple test, so it’s stuck around in the toolkit.