A critique on the underwhelming and outdated criteria

In the past few years, gender equity in the film industry has soared to heights that were previously unheard of, but Hollywood still has a long way to go to achieve a truly equal industry. Despite the increase in performative feminism in movies and TV shows, the outdated criteria of what makes a film ‘not-sexist’ sets the bar too low, rendering it ineffective in progressing women’s status on the silver screen.

The #MeToo and #TimesUp movements called out influential Hollywood directors for their harassment and exploitation of their female colleagues and marked a shift in the way many filmmakers began portraying women in their projects. Directors and screenwriters began to refrain from blatant objectification of female characters in their dialogues and instead poured their energy into meeting standards of supposed feminism set by antiquated critiques of film and social media from earlier decades. The most notable examples of this include the Bechdel test and the newly-coined term “female gaze”.

The Bechdel test, which Hollywood accepts as the baseline re- quirement for a film to be deemed “not sexist” or “feminist” mandates that a body of work must have at least two female characters who have at least one conversation unrelated to a male character. Although the test sets a subordinate bar for filmmakers, the website bechdeltest.com reveals that a staggering 40% of films made in recent years have failed this test. This statistic seems even more barren considering that a movie passing the Bechdel test does not necessarily make it a film that authentically embodies gender equality.

Some less popular means to measure the presence of gender equity in a film are the rating systems of F and A. Both were created to remedy gender inequality, but due to both systems being somewhat rare and irrelevant in Hollywood, neither of these rating methods have made any acceleration towards gender equity in Hollywood, leaving the Bechdel test as the only widely known measure of sexism in a film.

The absence of prominent and adequate measures of fem-