Are Edinburgh Fringe reviewers sexist? | One blogger has crunched the numbers © freeimages.co.uk

Are Edinburgh Fringe reviewers sexist?

One blogger has crunched the numbers

Some Edinburgh Fringe reviewers are demonstrably biased against female comedians, one blogger has claimed.

The writer, called Jay Jay, spent two weeks compiling 1,530 reviews from across 12 publications in the search for gender bias. 

Across the board, 69 per cent of shows reviewed were by male comics, 31 per cent by female comics.

But is not the fact more men were reviewed that is at issue –  since that reflects the fact there are more men than women performing at the festival – but the star ratings comedians were given.

Across the board, the distribution of stars reflected the same gender breakdown, too – the split was 68:32 for five- and three- star reviews and 69:31 for four. The exception was the one-star category, where men featured notably higher than expected.

But Jay Jay still found evidence of gender bias, writing: ‘Although the overall picture looks benign, once I began to break down star ratings to each publication, a different picture emerged.’

She said that The Scotsman, for example, ‘demonstrates clear misogynistic gender bias in the awarding of stars.

All eight of the newspaper’s five-star comedy reviews were for men, while sixty per cent of its two-star reviews and three of the four one-star reviews were for women, even though they represented only 32 per cent of the acts reviewed.

The Wee Review was also accused of a ‘strong bias towards men’ in awarding 13 of its 14 five-star reviews to male comedians, although women did slightly better than would have been statistically expected to do when it came to four-star reviews.

In contrast, The Skinny was praised for being a ‘favourable publication for female artists’ as women were over represented in the five and four-star reviews handed out.

Jay Jay said that ‘of the other publications I reviewed, it was hard to draw any concrete conclusions’. 

Chortle ‘appears to show little bias’, she concluded, with the breakdown of stars corresponding to the ratio of genders reviewed, except in the one-star category, where all five of our worst reviews went to male acts.

She did caution that some caution should be taken in reading her figures – which were published on The Howl Sanctuary. Sample sizes are small, especially at the extremes of one and five-star reviews, and sometimes the deviation from the statistical expectation is relatively small.

Gareth Morinan, a comedian and trained statistician says the research sometimes ‘reads like less of a scientific report and more of a subjective opinion piece… perhaps the author has chosen to emphasise certain results over others.’

Of The Scotsman’s apparent sexism, he said: ‘It could be selection bias as opposed to review bias. Also it could be one reviewer causing that bias, as opposed to the entire publication.’

Published: 5 Sep 2017

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