The argument of whether females are portrayed fairly in media, mainly films, and books, remains to be a controversial topic. Which is baffling within itself, since the fact that there are even arguments about this means that there is some form of inequality in women’s representation in popular culture. There is even a test named the Bechdel Test that tests works of fiction on whether the female representation is fair in media. Named after Bechdel-Wallace from a comic strip in the 1980s, the test has three rules to see whether a film or any work of fiction attempts to at least give women a couple of lines of dialogue. These are it’s three rules:

- The movie has to have at least two women in it

who talk to each other,

about something besides a man

They seem simple enough, however, the number of movies and books that actually pass this test is increasing, but that's not saying much. Some of the most famous and well-loved films out there don’t pass it, such as “ The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, “The Star Wars” trilogy, and even “Avatar”. The author of the comic strip that came up with this test, claims that she originally got the idea from a Virginia Woolf passage where she questions the relationships between women in novels, calling them “too simple”. And saying that she couldn’t recall the last time she read about female characters who were friends rather than mothers and daughters. One of the novels this paper is examining, Gone Girl was turned into a film, and actually, both adaptations do pass the test. There is a website that goes into detail and shows readers the exact moments where two women converse about a topic that is not another man:
https://bechdeltest.com/view/5801/gone_girl/ .

This test has now evolved and added more explicit rules since many people claimed the previous rules were too basic and still did not represent women a way that is even remotely close to how much exposure men get.