UK Panel Show Gender Breakdown

Key: male female other/diverse

By @astronomyblog & @LoveGraphs. Stats last updated 14 January 2020

Generally, panel shows on UK television include few female guests. Most have male hosts and male captains/regulars. Even omitting the regulars, the guests are mostly men too. It is a problem that half the population are under-represented in these long-running TV and radio shows.

Is the situation really that bad? In short, yes (but slowly improving). I've compiled some statistics for current, long-running, shows from comedy.co.uk, Love Graphs (thanks Richard!), just-a-minute.info, IMdB, iPlayer, BBC Genome, Wikipedia and broadcasts to illustrate the point. The table below is split into comedy panel shows and others*. Many of them are comedy panel shows so I've made a non-exhaustive list of funny women to provide inspiration for the show makers.

Discussion

Nearly all these long-running shows under-represent women even if you ignore the regulars. Few shows have equal representation amongst guests. I contend that some shows even under-represent the number of women on the comedy circuit (which, from various evidence, is around 17-24%).

Funny women

If you are looking for some funny women, here is a non-exhaustive list of suggestions (feel free to tweet me more suggestions)

Update 8 February 2014: The BBC's director of TV has said that "panel shows such as QI and Mock the Week will no longer have all-male line-ups". It is good to know the issue is being tackled. Hopefully it doesn't result in women being limited to one per episode.

Update October 2015: As I worried, Mock The Week seem to have used the 2014 ruling to limit women to one per episode. I agree with the departing Andy Parsons that they could take the opportunity to have a woman regular.

Update December 2016: This research got written up by Chortle and the Guardian. The Guardian article included some good quotes from comedians. Robert Lawson and Ursula Lutzky have an article about language splits on a season of Mock the Week (Discourse, Context & Media, Volume 13, Part B, September 2016, Pages 143â€“153).

Update December 2017: Tiff Stevenson wrote about the BBC moving away from comedy panel shows back in August.

Please TV-land people: sort this all out.