University Challenge

The photo looks like one of those reconstructions done after archaeologists dig up a bit of skull, but done very badly.

Juno Dawson was crap and an embarrassment to the team. Kept a better player off (never mind man / woman). Plus as a pp said, there was a lot of performative shit going on. Didn’t pass either, despite the facial feminisation surgery.

Mmm, do you think the reason that women are under-represented in almost every sector of society & the media is simply because 'the best person gets the spot', and the best person is usually a man? Or could there be other factors at play? 🤔

True. The unis without STEM faculties like the Corthauld Institute usually do badly, as many of the questions are STEM based.

They also dumb them down because very few of the alumni have a STEM background. On the main competition there are lots of STEM questions and any sensible team will have at least one STEM student who enjoys reading novels, sport, music, films or other mainstream cultural things as well.

Also they definitely dumb down the questions for the alumni because many of them are not that good and wouldn’t have stood a chance of being on the UC team when they were actually at uni.

It’s alumni, not current students for the Christmas version. Plus most unis have equal numbers or more women and still the number of men outweighs women on UC. Men seem more likely to enter and succeed in the competition. Not sure why.

Amazing - they appear to have morphed.

There were equal numbers of men and women at Uni by 1992, though, so I don't think that can be the answer.

The undergraduate UC teams tend to be male dominated because...males dominate. The alumni teams are just more of the same, with the added factor of society's tendency to defer to men as experts far more than women (see also all other forms of media).

As I've already said I do think they should have had at least one female team member. However, the pool they're choosing from for the Christmas competition is alumni of note, who by definition come (the older ones, anyway) from a time when far fewer women went to university, and of those who did make it only a tiny handful would have made it to the Who's Who level of success that I assume is used to pick these alumni teams. So it's not that surprising that the alumni teams are very unbalanced. The real scandal is how few women feel able to take part in the main competition, for the reasons mentioned above.

Bangor has a 60% female to 40% male ratio.

So have completely failed to actually balance the team.

There have been very many all male teams on UC and there are far more male contestants than female ones - often the token female on the team is largely silent. So I am guessing it's just because this person is trans that you have an issue because you are much mistaken if you think all the teams are mixed or balanced.

Much as I love to see women in a team, there is a selection process. A family member was on University Challenge recently and had to go through loads of interview type rounds to be selected. Surely it's just a case of best person gets the spot?

Wow OK, that sounds pretty batshit. Thanks for linking, @NeighbourhoodWatchPotholeDivision — I can’t read much on X but might try and recover my password at some point.

Had no idea who she was beyond that article!

Beard thing, probably.

Don't mention Lucy Clarke on FWR. Someone once posted an article by her for Julie Bindel to read, after Julie objected to University Challenge featuring two all-male teams.

Dr (?) Clarke turned up, absolutely outraged, because she didn't want "TERFS" saying her name in the context of anything.

https://twitter.com/CathMitch14/status/1310672058339205121

It turned into an absolutely mad thread.

What??? I knew Alex Bellos when we were younger, and he looked nothing like Michael Sheen then. Off to Google. Maybe he's had a face transplant?

Dawson was an embarrassment. Offered nothing of use and stole the opportunity from a woman.

Some producer must be a clueless TRA. Was surprised they didn't shoehorn yet more TRAlala genderwoo in tonight's Barbie question by asking about trans Barbie 🙄

Freddie McConnell's appearance on the show gave me the opportunity to inform my family that this is a person who took testosterone for years, had their breasts cut off in a double mastectomy, got a GRC changing their legal sex from female to male. Then a few weeks later got pregnant, gave birth but tried to insist on being registered as the baby's father. Took legal action and lost. And lost again.
And I think somewhere along the way complained that nobody had told them a mastectomy meant you couldn't breastfeed. But I might be wrong about that.

Bring it into the mainstream, I say. The more people who can see how it makes no sense the better.

I thought that. Of course, it was Juno Dawson who said 'A lot of gay men are gay men as a consolation prize, because they couldn't be women'.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/juno-dawson-attitude-magazine-interview-transgender-gay-man-lgbt-trans-woman-a7752701.html

Bangor's appearance in the earlier rounds was the first time I have seen Juno Dawson 'in action' as it were. The number of performative hair-flicks, hand-clasps beneath the chin and touches on the arm of the neighbouring male contestant were off the scale. Last night this person giggled 'Don't ask me, I only got a C in my GCSE Maths' along with similar tinkly declarations. So 'feminine'.

No women did this.

Ah right, I hadn’t noticed that as I don’t watch episodes with transwomen in. Rest of the household like UC Christmas and are #bekind because they are male and don’t care, so I generally just go and find something else to do while it’s on.

They've had previous trans contestants on the Christmas shows, they just showed photos from as long ago as they were happy with for those contestants, rather than their university years specifically.

Women don’t want to go on it because when they do, they get torn apart and sexualised on Twitter/X.

https://amp.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/mar/22/university-challenge-social-media-abuse-lucy-clarke

Editing to add link. I mean, there are loads of other reasons I’m sure but I imagine this does put some women off. It would have put me off.