The Rudd Test (aka: Why Doesn’t it Rain Indoors?)

Faye’s game wouldn’t pass the Rudd Test

"Why doesn’t it rain indoors?" That’s a pretty good question if you think about it. Especially when it comes from a boy in Mrs Dickinson’s third-year junior school class.

My friend David had noticed something the rest of us hadn’t: it doesn’t rain indoors. Actually we had observed this. It’s just that we’d seen it not rain indoors so often that we didn’t even think about it. The point is not that David had noticed, but that he’d noticed that he’d noticed.

I’m no expert, but I suspect that there’s an evolutionary advantage in being able to forget about stuff that happens all the time. That's all very well, but the downside is that when the everyday passes us by we run the risk of not thinking to question why things are that way. Is it the natural order of things or are they constructed in some way? Brought about by us?

Assuming that we do want to ask why - why, for instance, there are so few women tournament chess players in Britain today - what are we going to do? Well, the first step is that we need to decide that noticing the phenomenon is something that we want to do. Jack Rudd has come up with a way to help us.

More of the Rudd Test later. First, I have to set the scene by talking a bit about women in film.

Mrs Dickinson worked here

You many recall January’s media furore over the absence of nominations (again) for non-White actors in this year’s Academy awards (Similar to the Oscars?). The situation for women in film is clearly rather different. Thanks to Best Actress; Best Supporting Actress at least two statues are assured to go to women. Issues around gender and film remain, however, not the least of them being how female characters are portrayed - or not, as the case may be - on screen. 

Women in modern cinema are systematically under-represented in terms of screen time (even in Disney films about princesses), marginalised in roles that are tangental to the main story and very often all but invisible. That’s when female characters are there at all. Of the eight Best Picture nominees for this year’s Oscars, three - Bridge of Spies, The Revenant and The Big Short - have no significant roles for women. Of the remainder The Martian just about does (Jessica Chastain captains the ship that’s on its way to rescue the stranded astronaut but this is very much Matt Damon’s film) and just one the four central characters in Spotlight central is female*. Only Room has a narrative lead by a female character.

Hence the Bechdel Test. Put simply, all a film has to do to pass is have two named female characters appear on screen together having a conversation about something that is not a man. Not exactly setting the bar absurdly high, and yet an astonishing number of films fail to meet even this modest standard.

As instruments of measurement go, Bechdel is certainly a blunt one. Failing the test doesn’t necessarily mean your film is loathsomely misogynistic. Passing won’t necessarily get you the approval of what Nigel Short likes to call the "Tyrannical Feminist Lobby". Nevertheless Bechdel has worth. Principally in helping us notice that we've noticed that it doesn’t rain indoors.

When you consider entire populations of films - all those you’ve seen this month, this year, this life time - the Bechdel Test helps us notice the discrepancy in how male and female characters are portrayed on screen. It reminds us that it’s not The Martian’s gender roles that are the problem. It’s that things are nearly the main character = male, secondary character = female way around.

Jack Rudd
photo by Olivia Netshagen

Last week Jack Rudd proposed we adopt our own version of the Bechdel Test for chess. To pass a tournament must at some stage pair one woman chesser against another. That’s all. It is not, I feel, setting the bar absurdly high.

Jack set some qualifications. The event must not be an all-play-all, not be open only to female participants and not adopt special pairing rules. If I am allowed to fiddle with his idea I might be tempted to add a further point about age - the women involved must be older than, say, 16.

Given these criteria, how many chess tournaments would pass the Rudd Test? Jack suggests that Gibraltar would pass easily. I suspect that most of Sean Hewitt's e2-e4 events - making a welcome comeback at Gatwick in a couple of weeks, btw - probably would too. How many others, do you think? Not many probably. Not enough, certainly.

It doesn’t rain indoors. A tiny proportion of tournament chessers are women. We all know that these things are true. They are so obviously true that we don’t usually pay them any attention. Maybe we should, though. Maybe it’s worth having a think about whether the number of women at chess events is, like rain, a naturally occurring phenomenon or if there’s something else at play. Whether it’s something which we could and should be addressing.

It says something about where we are with respect to gender diversity that every tournament having  even just one game played between two women would be a huge step forward for British chess. The Rudd Test is not the solution to all of chess’s problems. It is, though, something which could helps us think about gender issues. It’s something that would allow us some way to measure progress - or lack thereof - in terms of increasing the numbers of women playing competitively.

The Bechdel Test has become commonplace in discussions about film and the film industry. I hope one day we’ll be able to say the same about the Rudd Test and chess.

* that’s twice as good as The Hateful Eight, admittedly.