We can prove that women are as funny as men — we just don’t believe it.
A new study showed that when a group of people were given jokes … but didn’t know who wrote them … they found a statistically insignificant difference between jokes written by men and women. ‘
But tell them who wrote the joke? Suddenly the jokes by men are the ones that give them belly laughs.
This is a new study, but it’s an old problem. Last March Saybrook faculty member Steven Pritzker, a former Hollywood comedy writer, talked about how he’d only realized the contributions of women are ignored in the arts when he started editing The Encyclopedia of Creativity.
He nailed the problem that researchers at the UC San Diego just identified. The bad news — it’s been going on for centuries. The good news? It’s getting better.
Read the interview