The Food Network's Chopped: Men and women

If you’ve watched the Food Network’s television show Chopped, you may have wondered, as I have, whether there are any competitive advantages afforded by the show’s format. For instance, is there a discernible advantage to cooking in the station closest to the pantry? What about types of chefs? Are sous chefs more likely to win than pastry chefs?

Without data, we can’t know, and I don’t have the data to study those particular questions. But I do have data to study at least one question. Do the judges give men an advantage?

I wondered about that after noticing that the most recent Chopped Champions finale episode featured four male chefs, and remembered that the Grill Masters finale featured four men, too. So, I gathered that data.

In the spreadsheet below, I’ve listed each episode by number, the contestants by gender, and where those contestants finished in that episode, based on the information posted on the show’s Wikipedia page. Through 169 episodes, there were 239 women and 437 men. That is, 35 percent of the competitors were women, and 65 percent were men.

Of the 169 winners, 48 were women, 29 percent, and 121 were men, 71 percent. Going down the line, 52 women finished as runner-up, or about 31 percent of runners-up. Meanwhile, 75 women finished in third place, eliminated after the entree round, or about 44 percent of third-place finishers, while 61 women were eliminated after the appetizer round, or 36 percent of those finishers.

So, assuming all contestants on the show have roughly the same ability, that would indicate… I’m not sure what it indicates, except that there probably aren’t enough episodes to draw hard conclusions. Soft conclusions? Maybe the one soft conclusion is that, before seeing how many men and women will be on a given episode, one can expect that a woman will be eliminated after the entree round.

Of course, I also haven’t analyzed what happened when there were one, two, or three women in a given show, and how that may have affected voting. Perhaps an enterprising soul will find something interesting in those situations.

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