Lazzo would later walk this back, but the comment remains as a stark reminder of the challenges women face in the writing room. But does Lazzo's critique have any merit at all? Do ratings suffer when more women are involved in the writing process?



To test how female writers may affect comedy ratings, we turn to IMDb, which allows millions of users to rate movies and TV shows. It also provides a wealth of information, including the writing credits of each released project. For our analysis, we gathered data on IMDb’s top 100 comedy TV series .

In total, these 100 series have released 12,300 episodes written by 2,267 unique writers. Using a combination of data collection tools — including researching nearly 400 writers by hand — we were able to confidently predict the gender for 2,250 of those writers, giving us a final sample of 12,237 episodes to work with .