How Often Does Doctor Who Pass The Bechdel Test?
Guest contributor Sarah Barrett puts all 117 episodes of New Who to the test.
The Bechdel Test – if you don’t know already – is passed if a movie or TV show fulfils the following criteria:
- It has to have at least two women in it
- Who talk to each other
- About something other than a man.
Simple, right? Well, not entirely. It’s considered a very low bar to pass, which makes it all the more surprising that so many mainstream movies still fail. It’s a little tricky to apply to TV shows, too. Yet, I was determined to give it a try. After viewing the previous much-talked-about experiment of this kind, I wasn’t impressed. Vitally important things had been missed out, whole episodes had been missed out, and I wanted to do better.
I gathered data from all 117 episodes of modern-day Doctor Who (2005-2014), published it, and encouraged people to discuss, analyse and vote on it. Some interesting questions got raised – I still don’t know whether Cyber-Jackie in The Age of Steel counts as ‘a female character’ or not. But I truly hope that the process was as fair as it could possibly be.
I made two infographics, which can be found here, and here. This article just presents the graphs separately, no information has been edited.
The data, then:
80% seems like a fairly respectable number for a show of this size, but when you consider again what a low bar the Bechdel Test sets it seems less impressive. If the Doctor(s) had been female, all of these episodes would have passed.
Only two episodes have only one female speaking role in them – Cold War and Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS. In terms of sheer number of female characters (whether they speak to each other or not) Doctor Who does tend to do better than many other shows. Which brings us to:
Some of this data seems a little surprising on the surface, but on closer look perhaps it’s not. Martha, Donna and Clara were all confident and caring people, always likely to speak with and befriend other women. River often had her mother – Amy – on hand to have conversations with. With Rose, it’s only really the second half of Series One that lets her down in the Bechdel Test stakes, but after that she went right back to conversing with the other women she met on her adventures.
Amy is a bit of an anomaly. Part of this may be down to her isolation in her first series – no parents, a spiky personality, and a complicated relationship with both her boyfriend Rory and the Doctor. She would have passed many more Bechdel Tests had more of the supporting characters (Canton, for example, or Professor Bracewell) that she had connected with been female. But on the other other hand, a female character who relates more to men than to other women is still a perfectly valid female character. (And Amy is my favourite.) I do wish she and River had gotten to have more conversations that weren’t about the Doctor, though.
However, it wasn’t with Amy that the show started to slide with regards to the Bechdel Test – that happened one year earlier, with the Specials. (Only 3/5 them pass.) It was also round here that episodes started to pass with only the bare minimum, as the colour-coded graph shows (episodes going from red to green depending on how many lines were exchanged between women):
There was a definite downturn on the way out of Davies’ series (perhaps due to the Specials featuring the Doctor without an official companion for the most part?) and the way into Moffat’s. Things seem to be picking up now, however. Or it is in some senses, but not all:
Doctor Who hasn’t done brilliant presenting women of colour as of late. Martha is still the only WOC companion, and modern-day Doctor Who has been on air for almost ten years! The companions don’t remotely represent the demographics of modern Britain at the moment.
With Clara came both Angie (one of her charges) and Courtney (one of her students). One was a little bratty and one a little disruptive, but they did get to be clever and brave in their respective one-episode adventures. That’s important too, but it’s a shame they never met, or were ever seen having conversations with their friends. After Series Four, Doctor Who never again (to date) passed a Bechdel Test between two women (or girls) of colour – not even in the mould of Turn Left, where two named background women converse. This is one thing Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who should start doing better.
But one thing that (to my surprise) Moffat’s Doctor Who did do better than Davies’ was conversations between women who are LGBT. This is almost entirely down to the presence of Madame Vastra and her wife Jenny, who are the second lesbian couple modern-day Doctor Who has presented – the first, the Cassinis from Gridlock, don’t actually pass a Bechdel Test between the two of them.
Cassandra has a conversation with her younger self in the episode New Earth. She’s still Doctor Who’s only transgender character to date (no, the horse doesn’t count) and I’m sure I’m not alone in calling for more.
I would have included a section for Bechdel Test passes between disabled women, but… there aren’t any. This isn’t surprising, since despite Doctor Who being a show that can go anywhere it wishes in space and time, the universe seems remarkably devoid of disabled people. This does seem to be picking up a bit in recent years – Ada Gillyflower, Porridge, Bellows, a deaf actress has been cast for Series Nine – but again, I’d like to call for more.
Moffat and Davies (the two showrunners) write Bechdel Test-passing episodes at roughly the same rate. But of course, here we’re skirting around the elephant in the room- Doctor Who’s poor track record when it comes to hiring women writers. Helen Raynor has written four, and Catherine Tregenna is signed up for Series Nine. But I do think the show has got a long way to go on that front.
In conclusion, Doctor Who isn’t doing badly when it comes to the Bechdel Test – and the Bechdel Test is definitely not the only indication of how feminist or unfeminist a TV show is anyway. But, it could really use more women of colour, LGBT women, disabled women, women of every demographic – and, of course, more female writers.
Hopefully, by the time the show reaches its 100-year anniversary, every single one of these stats will have gone up.
