Rebecca Pahle at the Mary Sue explains that cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s famous test for whether a movie features any meaningful female characters is catching on in a more official way:

When deciding what movie to go see, moviegoers are used to a rating system providing them with a few basic facts. The level of violence in the film, for example, and whether there’s sex or cursing. Now theaters in Swedish cinemas have added something new to their ratings system: Whether the film passes the Bechdel Test.
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Films that pass the Bechdel Test will be given an A rating by four Swedish cinemas, including Stockholm’s Bio Rio arthouse theater. Ellen Tejle, Bio Rio’s director, notes that “For some people [the ratings system] has been a real eye-opener.”

With the exception of Iron Man 3, most summer blockbusters this year did not pass the Bechdel test. I don’t necessarily agree with people using the Bechdel Test as an up-or-down system to determine the goodness of a movie, but it does often work as a guidepost as to whether a movie is well-written or not. A screenwriter who acknowledges that women are independent human beings, shockingly, is often a better screenwriter than one who believes women are there solely to reflect the actions and thoughts of men.

I’m not entirely for a Bechdel ratings system just because I’m generally against the idea of hard and fast entertainment ratings. (I don’t think that smoking in movies should automatically warrant an R-rating, for example, because it could keep kids from seeing some important movies, and it could prevent parents from having a very important conversation with their children about why, say, everyone is smoking in a historical drama.) But I think some sort of an advisory label, as they’re doing in Sweden, might be a good idea, just to further educate moviegoers that this is a real problem with movies in the 21st century. I’d at the very least like to see movies that pass the Bechdel Test openly brag about the fact that they pass the Bechdel Test in their promotional materials. Because right now, it’s unbelievable that so many films don’t come anywhere near presenting two decent female characters.