Bechdel and Other Tests

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Written by Erin McCoy, Katie Creel, Diana Navas, Juliette Woodrow, and Elyse Cornwall. Inspired by “The Next Bechdel Test”.

List Comprehensions

Temps, Revisited

Let's revisit a problem from last section: we have a list of temperatures temps_f in Fahrenheit, and we want to produce a list temps_c of those temperatures in Celsius.

        
          temps_f = [45.7, 55.3, 62.1, 75.4, 32.0, 0.0, 100.0]
        
      

Last section, we saw how to do this with map. Now, write a list comprehension to create the list temps_c.

Movie Tuples

Suppose we have a list of tuples representing movies, for example:

        
        movies = [('alien', 8, 1), ('titanic', 6, 9), ('parasite', 10, 6), ('caddyshack', 4, 5)]
      
      

The first element of each movie tuple is the movie name, the second element is the overall score, and the third element is the "date score" (how appropriate the movie is for a date). Write list comprehensions to do the following, given some list movies like the one above.

1. Produce a list of the second elements (overall scores) of each tuple.
2. Produce a list of the sum of the second and third elements (overall score plus date score) of each tuple.
3. Produce a list of the first elements (movie name) of each tuple, except that the first character of each name is made uppercase. You can assume that each movie name has at least one character, and don't worry about movie names that are multiple words.

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Bechdel and Other Tests

A Short History

Named for Alison Bechdel, the Bechdel Test seeks to analyze the representation of women in fictional media. To pass the Bechdel Test, a film must:

1. Feature two women
2. Who have a conversation
3. About something other than a man

Here's a graph showing what percentage of movies made in a given year satisfy these rules, dating from 1888 to 2019. Although a majority of movies today pass the Bechdel Test, roughly a third do not!

The popularity of the Bechdel Test has inspired others to create their own tests measuring other inequities in media. Here are a few examples:

• A movie passes the Uphold Test if 50% of the on-set crew is female.
• A movie passes the Waithe Test if it features a Black woman in a position of power in a healthy relationship.
• A movie passes the Ko Test if it has a non-white, female-identifying person in the film who speaks in five or more scenes and speaks English.

For more information about Bechdel and definitions of other tests, take a look at “The Next Bechdel Test” article.

Overview

In this section, you will use your nested data structure and matplotlib skills to build your very own data visualization program. You will use a dataset consisting of about 50 movies, along with which tests each movie passes and fails. Your goal is to build a piece of software that helps you investigate representation and bias in movies.

This problem is a natural extension of the interesting ethical topics that we have talked about in CS106A so far this quarter. Our hope is that by introducing these topics early in your computer science education, we can help the next generation of computer scientists - which now includes you! - be mindful of the potential social implications of their work, and use their powerful skills to help others.

Plotting Data

• Milestone 1: Getting started with matplotlib. To make sure you have everything installed properly, download this starter code (same as the file at the top of this handout) and open it in Pycharm as usual. If you haven't installed matplotlib already, open the terminal in Pycharm and run the following command (if you have a Windows computer, substitute py for python3): python3 -m pip install matplotlib
• Milestone 2: Load in the data. Open next_bechdel_tests.txt and look at the file format:

  
  Movie,Bechdel,Peirce,Landau,Feldman,Villarreal,Hagen,Ko,Villalobos,Waithe,Koeze_Dottle,Uphold,White,Rees-Davies
  Bad Moms,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,1,0,0,1,1,1
  Hidden Figures,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,1,0,1,1,1,1
  Independence Day: Resurgence,0,0,1,0,0,1,0,1,0,0,1,1,1
  
  

  The first line of the file tells us what each of the columns means. Each line that follows contains a movie name, followed by a series of 0’s and 1’s that represent if a movie has passed a test (0), or failed (1). For example, "Bad Moms" passes the Bechdel Test, but fails the Feldman test. We want to store this data as a movie_data dictionary where the key is a movie name, like "Bad Moms" and the value is a list of the tests it fails and passes as integers. Here's an example of what our movie_data dictionary might look like:

  
  {
    'Bad Moms': [0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1], 
    'Hidden Figures': [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1], 
    'Independence Day: Resurgence': [0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1],
    ...
  }
  
  

  Implement the function, read_file(filename) which opens a text file like the one above and creates and returns a movie_data dictionary as described above. You can print out what your movie_data dictionary looks like by running python3 bechdelgraphs.py -dict
• Milestone 3: Create Plots for Bechdel Test.

  Implement the function plot_test(movie_data, test_name), which plots the total number of movies that passed and failed for a specific test, using a movie_data dictionary just like the one from Milestone 2.

  We've provided the line test_index = TESTS.index(test_name) to get the index of a given test name in our test list. For example, test_index for "Bechdel" is 0, and test_index for "Feldman" is 3. From here, you'll total all the passes and fails for this test_index across all the movies in movie_data, adding to the count variables num_passed and num_failed that we provide for you.

  Finally, you'll plot your data on a bar graph. Recall that you can use matplotlib to make a bar graph by providing a list of x and y values, and a color (or a list of colors):

                
  x_vals = # some list of x values
  y_vals = # some list of y values
  plt.bar(x_vals, y_vals, color="green")
  

  To test your function, type: python3 bechdelgraphs.py -test Bechdel

  Your plot might look something like the following:

  
• Milestone 4: Look at Other Tests.

  Check out other tests by running python3 bechdelgraphs.py -test TestName for any test name shown in the data file. For example, how many movies in our dataset pass the Villalobos Test?

• Milestone 5: Ethics Questions. Consider the values embedded in the tests you selected for Milestone 4. What are those values and how do they differ from those in the Bechdel Test? If you could design your own test, what would it be? What other values would you prioritize?