Want to measure a film’s diversity? Try “the DuVernay test.”

Over the past few weeks, the Hollywood diversity debate has gone from national conversation to direct action. And now a New York Times reporter has proposed a new measurement, the “DuVernay test,” to see just how well those actions hold up to the cause for inclusion.

On Friday, New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis described this year’s Sundance Film Festival as one fest that “continues to push against the mainstream tide through some of its selections.” In a moment when Hollywood is at a crossroads, that characteristic allows Sundance to teach the mainstream film industry a thing or two about how to make its next moves on the diversity front.

Dargis focuses on Nate Parker’s directorial debut, The Birth of a Nation, which took home the coveted Grand Jury Prize in addition to setting a Sundance record for distribution rights. The reason films like Parker’s are “helping to write the next chapter of American cinema,” Dargis writes, is because Sundance is a space where filmmakers are able to showcase “experimental narratives” that go against the status quo:

It’s also where numerous selections pass the Bechdel test (movies like Christine and Sand Storm, in which two women talk to each other about something besides a man) and, in honor of the director and Sundance alumna Ava DuVernay, what might be called the DuVernay test, in which African-Americans and other minorities have fully realized lives rather than serve as scenery in white stories.

Here’s a quick rundown on Dargis’s new term.

Well, for starters, the DuVernay test isn’t yet a real test. But the idea behind it is similar to one that does exist, called the Bechdel test.

The Bechdel test is named after cartoonist Alison Bechdel, whose 1985 “Dykes to Watch Out For” comic strip criticized the way men dominated the movie screen.

In order to pass the Bechdel test, fiction films have to meet the following three criteria:

It’s not a perfect system, but the point is to make sure films show women as fully realized human beings, independent from men.

With the DuVernay test, the idea is to hold a similar standard to how people of color are portrayed onscreen.

When Selma director Ava DuVernay found out that Dargis had coined the term in her honor, she let us all know on Twitter that she was humbly surprised.

However, if you look at DuVernay’s work both on and off screen, the homage should come as no surprise.

DuVernay has been one of the most consistently outspoken critics of diversity in Hollywood and one of those leading by example in the moves she’s been making around the industry.

For starters, she has been pushing the conversation forward with the point that diversity isn’t simply about representation; it requires a commitment to cultivating a culture of “belonging.”

“There’s a belonging problem in Hollywood,” she said at this year’s festival. “Who dictates who belongs? The very body who dictates that looks all one way.”

Diversity, for DuVernay, isn’t something you can be; it’s something you do. But that hinges on commitment to provide space for people with different backgrounds in a way that accords those who have been left out a value beyond mere tokenism.

DuVernay’s latest TV project is a good litmus test for what the DuVernay test requires.

At Sundance, the director announced that her latest project, a 13-episode series called “Queen Sugar” on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network, will feature an “all-women directorial team.”

Her initiative creates opportunities for more women to have a direct hand in the storytelling process. And by drawing from women in the black independent film circuit, she is making sure that women of color are counted among the directorial team, too.