production budget was negatively associated with the probability of passing the Bechdel test across 1200 movies from 1980–2019. However, the observed increase of films passing across years was stronger for higher budget films. Increases of movies passing the Bechdel test over the years from 1980 to 2019 were stronger also stronger for movies with higher revenues, and higher audience evaluations (IMDb ratings). Explanations Explanations that have been offered as to why many films fail the Bechdel test include the relative lack of gender diversity among scriptwriters and other movie professionals, also called the "celluloid ceiling": In 2012, one in six of the directors, writers, and producers behind the 100 most commercially successful movies in the United States was a woman. Writing in the American conservative magazine National Review in 2017, film critic Kyle Smith suggested that the reason for the Bechdel test results was that "Hollywood movies are about people on the extremes of society — cops, criminals, superheroes — [which] tend to be men". Such films, according to Smith, were more often created by men because "women's movie ideas" were mostly about relationships and "aren't commercial enough for Hollywood studios". He considered the Bechdel test just as meaningless as a test asking whether a film contained cowboys. Smith's article provoked vigorous criticism. Alessandra Maldonado and Liz Bourke wrote that Smith was wrong to contend that female authors do not write books that generate "big movie ideas", citing J. K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood and Nnedi Okorafor among others as counter-examples. Limitations The Bechdel test only indicates whether women are present in a work of fiction to a certain degree. A work may pass the test and still contain sexist content, and a work with prominent female characters may fail the test. A work may fail the test for reasons unrelated to gender bias, such as because its setting works against the inclusion of women (e.g., Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, set in a medieval monastery) or because it has few characters in general (e.g., Gravity, which has only two named characters). What counts as a character or as a conversation is not defined. For example, the Sir Mix-a-Lot song "Baby Got Back" has been described as passing the Bechdel test, because it begins with a valley girl saying to another "oh my god, Becky, look at her butt". In an attempt at a quantitative analysis of works as