On one hand, we live in the golden age of female comedy. Tina Fey, Lena Dunham, Mindy Kaling, Abbi Jacobson, Ilana Glazer, and their ilk certainly aren’t the first women to have wildly popular TV shows based entirely around their own funniness. But they might be some of the first to do it with fearless jokes about their vaginas. Next year, Amy Schumer will be the first female comedian to headline Madison Square Garden.

Women, suffice it to say, are funny. On the other hand, happy hours during which one man holds forth to a gaggle of raptly amused female onlookers exist. Mickes’s year-end review exists. My deftly hilarious female friends exist, and many are eternally single. If men and women are clearly capable of being equally funny, why does humor by non-famous women so often go unappreciated?

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In 2012, Mickes decided to see whether her student had a point. (Or rather, “I decided to redirect my anger into something productive,” as she described it.)

A common way scientists measure funniness is by making undergrads—the typical guinea pigs for social-science research—play a version of The New Yorker cartoon-caption contest. For her study, Mickes asked 32 students to write captions for 20 New Yorker cartoons. The men were “pretty excited about the task,” but the women were more reluctant. “There was one female subject who came in, looked horrified and said, ‘Uh, but I’m not funny,’” she recalled.

After the students finished writing their quips, a new set of participants rated the captions. They found the men’s punch-lines to be ever-so-slightly more clever—about .11 points more on a five-point scale.

The difference was small, but still, Mickes was horrified by the results. “I thought ‘Forget it, I'm never going to do research again,’” she said.

Past research on gender and New Yorker cartoons had been mixed. In a 2011 study in the journal Intelligence, male participants also penned more amusing captions than women did. But in a study the year before, the men’s and women’s one-liners were equally droll.

Mickes’s study revealed another interesting difference: Men wrote some of the best jokes, but they also used more profanity and sexual humor, and those jokes weren’t rated very funny. If men were truly the funnier sex, though, wouldn’t they be more consistently funny?

In a later experiment, Mickes gave both male and female participants a list of random words, such as “beef jerky” and “water slide,” and asked them to write paragraphs using the words. Without prompting, the men wrote funny paragraphs. The women’s paragraphs were more creative and better-written, but they weren’t funny. However, a surprising thing happened when Mickes explicitly told the participants to try to be funny in their paragraphs: Both genders used humor, and in equal measure.