There’s been some muttering online recently to the effect that the Bechdel Test isn’t important anymore, that the number of women represented in media doesn’t matter so long as the quality is good. The technical term for this idea is “horseshit.” Men are not the default configuration of humanity. We must stop acting as if they are. The larger the cast, the more imperative it is to include women. This is a point on which I have almost no compromise. The one exception is stories which feature a setting in which women would be rare, such as historical war dramas, but if you really know your history you’ll find that’s a much narrower slice of the narrative pie than is popularly believed.
Why am I such an absolutist on this point?
Because I wrote a book in which all but two of the speaking parts were women, and it didn’t hamper me at all. There was no compelling narrative reason to include more men. There were no story points that only made sense if they involved men. It was easy, almost thoughtlessly easy. And this is a book filled with sex and violence. I had a hard-bitten soldier, a cunning manipulator, a tough underdog, and so on. A speaking cast of about twenty two roles, with many different personalities, opinions, attitudes. Almost all of them women, and it didn’t hold the story back at all.
Which means that there is no compelling narrative reason to ever exclude women from your work.
Women are people, dammit, and that means they’re exactly as interesting as the writer makes them. They can fit any role in almost any story. There is no reason whatsoever to arbitrarily make women an afterthought, an also-there, an eternal minority. I mean it. And this is especially true of fantastic settings. The more unreality you put in your story, the fewer excuses you have. The larger your cast is, the more diverse it should be. (In all ways, of course, but I’m talking mainly about gender here.)
Your stance shouldn’t be finding justifications for including women in your work. It should be making sure you have enough of them! Unless you have a compelling need to exclude women, their absence is a flaw in your work. Yes, a flaw. It reduces your work’s quality. You can be brilliant in all the other ways, but if your cast is biased in favor of men, then it is not as good as it could be. I don’t mean this from a political standpoint, I mean that its asthetics will be hampered by your decision to exclude or downplay the presence of women in the world.
And also? If you do find that you have a “compelling reason” to exclude women from the story, then maybe you should take a long hard look at why you think that story needs to be told so badly, and why it needs to be told in such a way as to keep women out of it. Telling stories is about communicating. If you don’t talk to women, you’re avoiding direct communication with half the audience. What is so important that you can’t include everyone? This is a more political point, but then again aesthetics are more political than most people want to admit. (And yes, I do believe that the absence of men is not a flaw in the way that the absence of women is, at least not for fiction produced in the social and cultural context in which I currently operate.)
The larger the cast, the smaller the excuse. The more fantastic the setting, the more pathetic the justification.
Write a book. Include lots of women.