Baking & Gender: Anything We Should Be Aware Of?

I avidly watch the Great British Bake Off, and I am currently revisiting the fourth series on BBC2 this week. I am also a keen, although somewhat average, baker.

Now I am not looking at the Great British Bake Off through a food and nutrition lens, rather a gender-based lens.

As much as I like my health and fitness articles and opinions, I am also into my HR stuff; hence looking at the Great British Bake Off from a gender rather than a food angle.

For those of you who may not know, series 4 prompted some ‘groans’ about favouritism (i.e. Paul Hollywood and Ruby Tandoh) and the fact that the series 4 final contained only women.

Now, where possible, I like to get my facts straight before I make comments so I decided to look into these ‘groans’ and discover for myself if there were any grounds for these allegations.

Did you know:

There have been four series of the Great British Bake Off
There have 2 male and 2 female winners
There have been 12 finalists:
- 33% (n=4) have been male
- 67% (n=8) have been female
With the exception of series 3, by mid-series there are more female than male contestants
The finals:
- Two have been all female
- One has been all male
- One has been mixed (1 male and 2 females)

Background information about the programme and the data I have collected can be found in the Excel file: Gender & The Great British Bake Off (Excel) (2014)

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