I laughed, I cried, I threw up in my mouth a little, but I finally have all of the data for Supernatural’s Bechdel test. Now, let’s talk results.

Overall, 20.93% of episodes received a passing score of 3. 10.47% achieved a score of 2, 49.42% received 1, and 19.19% of episodes were given a null score for failing to feature two named female characters.

Over the entire show, the mean Supernatural episode scores 1.33 points (standard deviation 1.01), with a median and mode score of 1. In terms of numbers of named female characters, we can expect a mean of 2.63 women (SD 1.27) with median and mode 3. That is to say, a typical Supernatural episode has 3 women who never talk to each other.

[More analysis + graphs below the cut.]

In fact, of the show’s 172-episode run, the most frequent combined values were 2 women and a score of 1, which was given to 41 episodes. 3 women and a score of 1 was one of the second-highest data points, tying with 1 woman and a score of 0 at 30 episodes each.

The following graphs display trends in scores and number of women across the seasons, with the black lines showing the size of 1 standard deviation for each data point. In a normal distribution, 68% of data points fall within this range.

As you can see, there has been little measurable change across the run of the show, with the changes between seasons much smaller than the random variation between episodes. However, the average score is almost always lower than would be expected from a random distribution of scores (1.5).

There is a weak correlation between average score and average number of women, with an r-squared value of 0.70.

It is also notable that the lowest values for average score, average number of women and percentage of passes all coincide in season 6.

The most named women to ever appear in a Supernatural episode is 6. This has occurred in 5 episodes: Bloody Mary, Malleus Maleficarum, Swap Meat, The Mentalists and Hunteri Heroici.

There have only been 3 episodes without any named female characters: Point of No Return, The Devil You Know, and Everybody Hates Hitler.

By my judgement, the 5 most Bechdel-passing episodes - that is, the episodes with the most significant Bechdel-passing conversations - are Playthings, Malleus Maleficarum, 99 Problems, The Mentalists, and Pac-Man Fever.