The Bechdel test will hopefully be familiar to the reader base of Unconquered Peaks, but just to make sure that everyone is with me: The Bechdel test is a measure of the inclusion of women in media, which asks whether there are two women who speak to each other about something that isn’t a man. The test was the subject of an 1985 comic strip by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel, which features two women deciding to choose a film at the cinema based on the rules of the test. They are unable to find a film that passes, so they go home. Bechdel credits the rules to her friend Liz Wallace (and prefers the name Bechdel-Wallace Test), and suspects that Wallace was inspired by Virginia Woolf. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf notes that ‘All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. … And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. … They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men.’ Over fifty years later, Bechdel and Wallace sought to highlight this disparity between the depth of portrayal of women and men, and still today, this gap has not been closed.

10,000 acres of land on fire. Over 1000 firefighters at the scene. This may sound like the result of a natural catastrophe or a terrorist attack, but the disastrous El Dorado fire was actually caused by a gender reveal. A family in California used a pyrotechnic device to reveal their baby’s gender. It was supposed to release coloured smoke, but instead it destroyed six homes. Many will say that this instance is not representative of gender reveals as a whole. However, destruction like this has happened several times before.

For decades there has been a strong movement growing in Europe to ban women from wearing headscarves, niqabs, and burqas, labelling them as symbols of female oppression and threats to security. Far-right nationals have gone as far as saying that the wearing of these garments is not a causal, personal choice but part of a wider attempt by political Islamism to gain support and ‘win recruits’.