UNIVERSITY NEWS LAST UPDATED : 25 APRIL 2017
Female panellists on the BBC's Mock the Week speak less than their male counterparts, new research has shown.
Dr Robert Lawson, Senior Lecturer at Birmingham City University, and Dr Ursula Lutzky, Assistant Professor at Vienna University of Economics and Business, analysed an entire series of the comedy news show to see how frequently male and female panellists spoke.
They also looked at how long they spoke for, the amount of interruptions they experienced and the number of times they interrupted other speakers.
Their research focused on series five of the show, which aired in 2007, due to it having a comparatively higher number of female guests in a single series.
Nearly 60,000 words were analysed across the 10 episodes, with results revealing that just 4 per cent of the total words spoken were produced by female panellists, while 96 per cent of words were produced by male panellists. In terms of overall contributions, male panellists had 2,199 turns at talk, while female panellists only had 125.
The researchers cautioned that such results needed to be viewed in light of each episode having at least five permanent male panellists and one male guest panellist, but only one female guest panellist at most.
Dr Robert Lawson argued that “We would expect that with six panellists on Mock the Week that the talking time would be equally divided between all six comedians. Our research shows, however, that this doesn’t seem to be the case.
High profile female comedians have spoken out about the challenges of being a woman on the comedy circuit, including Jo Brand, Sandi Toksvig, Miranda Hart and the late Victoria Wood. While Caitlin Moran has revealed she declined offers to appear on comedy panel shows due to not wanting to be “the token woman”.
Lawson and Lutzky’s research argued that while the new guidelines put in place to ensure equal representation are a welcome step forward, production companies should look at how episodes favour male over female panellists and permanent over guest panellists.
Dr Lawson added: “More research is needed to compare the amount of talk produced by male and female panellists in series after 2014, when the decision was taken to ensure that at least one female panellist should be present on each episode of show like Mock the Week.
“What our findings show, however, is that just having one female panellist on the show doesn’t guarantee interactional equality; there’s an interplay between the gender of a panellist and their role on the show, which deserves further attention.”
The study also found that interruptions between men and women were significantly less frequent than between men, and that women were almost twice as likely to interrupt men than the other way around.