There is starting to be a greater push for women to be greater represented in front of and behind the camera. According to research in 2012, only 32 percent of Swedish state-funded features produced by women, and women directors and screenwriters. Anna Serner, CEO of the Swedish Film Institute (SFI), has been working to bring about gender equality within the film industry.
“When I started three and a half years ago, we had an assignment to aim for a 40/60 average of long feature films, in the key positions of director, screenwriter and producer. Of course this always means 40 percent women, but I would say that you should always aim for 50/50 over time” Serner commented “What I did was to be very clear in the goal and made an action plan for reaching the goal by the end of 2015. And it took us (only) two and a half years, to reach the goal”.
Serner went on to explain that with four out of five Swedish feature film receiving funding from SFI, their “Towards Gender Equality in Film Production” action plan naturally had a major effect on what films have been made. As could be expected with any shake up to the existing system, arguments and criticism ensued from both the creative and the business sides of the industry. Even neighbouring Scandinavian countries with a similar film funding system questioned the need for such an aggressive program.
Ellen Tejle, Director of Bio Rio, explains, “Back in 2013, we read that only 30% of women in film had speaking roles, and it got us thinking, ‘We need to do something ourselves! But we don’t produce films, we are just showing them’”.
Tejle explained that what the theatre did was to develop the world’s first film classification, “A-rate”, to show if a film passes The Bechdel Test. The Bechdel Test was inspired by American animator Alison Bechdel’s idea from 30 years ago, a basic measure to see if women are fairly represented in a film.

For a film to pass The Bechdel Test, the movie must:
• have at least two female characters
• they must both have names
• they must talk to each other about something other than a man.

Tejle went on to explain that as simple as it was, the “A-rate” campaign sent a shock wave through the industry and media from over eighty countries picked up the story. The Bechdel Test was used in a number of analyses that followed including the oft-quoted analysis in 2014 by New York based FiveThirtyEight, showing that, of Hollywood films produced since 1990, those which passed the Bechdel test actually had a better return on investment.
“One very common argument is that you shouldn’t do this because it limits the creativity, the freedom of speech and the quality of the artistic level of films. I would say exactly the opposite, actually, that you need gender equality and you need to get the underrepresented voices… to get quality” Serner commented