To think University Challange is sexist

[Uhohmummy]

Rounds on tonight's episode include "women and their husbands" and a picture round identifying male cricketers.
As usual, there's just one woman in the 8 contestants.
It surely cant be the case that most male students are cleverer than women so why aren't there more women on there each week? DH thinks it's because they just don't apply but I think there must be some other, possibly soft, barriers to women applying.
I'd be interested to hear if anyone agrees (or not).

*harassment

I went to a Q and A with Jeremy Paxman, at the Oxford Lit Fest. When asked about the imbalance of male and female students on the programme , he spluttered with rage, and said they had tried for years to encourage more women to apply, but nothing seemed to work!

Was just going to post that Thisisanotherusername any woman on social media gets a hard time from men. More so if there's an "armchair" male audience. Hideous.

Didn't Val McDermid's team win the Christmas one - she went to an all-female college (St Hilda's in Oxford) and they were a brilliant team. The women on UC really stand out when they are very knowledgeable ; not sure if that is a good or a bad thing...

as it happens, I got ALL the questions right in the round on 'use of smelling salts in victorian novels'....I don't think you could get a more female round

I applied when I was at uni - the questions were really hard!

I think the questions are biased towards those with a classical (or decent) education - those of us who attended the kind of comprehensive where you spend half the day waiting for the rest of the class to shut up are definitely disadvantaged however much we may know about our own field of interest.

I agree the questions are skewed to "male" interests and the criticism from Jeremy doesn't help. There was a round on baking a couple of years ago which happened to fall to a female team who got them all correct to which Jeremy said "why on earth do you know all that!" But he's utterly scathing if contestants don't know everything about opera, history, physics etc

Look at the pasting Gail Trimble got a few years ago. She was fantastic...practically won the series single handed (her team was later disqualified because one of them had left the college).

She got lots of media coverage, some of which was very negative about her appearance. She is a normal, nice looking girl with glasses (and a massive brain) but her appearance was unfavourably contrasted with models, pop stars and actresses. Because it wasn't enough for Gail to be enormously clever and capable. No. In order to be deemed acceptable she had to look like a member of Girls Aloud too.

I wouldn't be keen to expose myself to that.

Re the questions about women and their famous husbands: the starter for ten in that set was identifying a more famous woman, Margaret Mead the anthropologist, from the name of her less famous husband so it wasn't entirely unequal.

I was narked off by the cricketers question though. As if most women would be able to identify bloody cricketers. Mind you, ages ago there was a set of questions where contestants were invited to identify the designers of a selection on frocks from the Oscars for that year. I aced that one in the home quiz.

Ooh well done Newtlover! I only got Middlemarch.

I agree carefreeee. DH and I often remark that a classical education is a massive advantage for UC. How do 19 year olds translate Latin or identify classical music compositions so quickly otherwise?

Ironically I got the cricketers' names right (except the old one). But if there had been questions on embroidery or dressmaking as one poster suggested I wouldn't have a clue.

I didn't think that "women and their husbands" was a bad round though the title was a bit unfortunate. It was a round of prominent women married to prominent men, which was by definition a well balanced question. And I agree that "use of smelling salts in The Victorian Novel" is knowledge that skews about as female as you can get (certainly did in my household).

The nice thing about UC is that it's not just about recitation of memorised facts - it's about using those facts on the fly to anticipate the question or combine different elements to reach the answer - like the chemical elements which make a cooking word question. Or just keeping your head cool enough to work out that the smelling salts question just boils down to "which Victorian novel had a character in it called Eustacia Vye?".

Love the quote about Gail Trimble though: "intellectual blitzkreig". There are a few people I would love to wage intellectual blitzkreig on. How cool would it be to be that intelligent. I wonder what she is doing now. I hope she is happy and getting loads of work published ☺

Gail Trimble and her husband and brother (the nice one who told Nuts magazine where to get off when they asked him for her number) are on the current series of Only Connect. She's not quite as terrifying as she was back in the day. She's a classics academic (I'm rubbish at the official titles) at Oxford.

The Trimbles need to get on Eggheads. The eggs are getting a bit smug (not Kevin, obviously) and need a good blitzkrieging.

I was on it twice, ten years ago, and I was on a team of four with one extra in reserve, ranked entirely in order of who did best in the multiple tests we sat as individuals. I certainly felt no personal barriers to applying or appearing, but I do think it's probably the case that it tends to be a certain type of nerdy bloke to goes in for these things and that's perhaps because women aren't encouraged to show off their knowledge (fortunately I LOVE any opportunity to demonstrate my knowledge of useless and obscure facts ).
I absolutely loved it and Paxman was very pleasant behind the scenes and not at all as he presents on TV. I'm no Gail Trimble but I managed to get all my buzzed in answers correct [proud] and I've still got the lightbox sticker with my name on it somewhere!

Depends Who would want to be anywhere near the superstitious and smug,without any reason, Paxman?

What a dick head. Totally boring quiz. Now the chase that's a game show.

Women are (for some strange reason) generally less assertive, and I think possibly more cautious about answering unless they're 101% sure they're right.

As an aside, re paxman and 'But he's utterly scathing if contestants don't know everything about opera, history, physics etc' ...I don't watch UC that often, but I remember him being scathing when a chemistry question was answered incorrectly...but something in what he said made it clear to anyone with a bit of knowledge in that area that he didn't have a bloody clue about it himself.

Knit, are you the girl who buzzed in really quickly with 'slip' (starter question about pottery making) and made Paxman say, "Crikey!" (Or something similar)?

Even if not, kudos to you!

I go to a lot of pub quizzes. The questions are always geared towards more stereotypically male interests.

'superstitious and smug' ... presumably that's autocorrect having a laff at 'supercilious'?

@nettletheelf I actually can't remember, it's so long ago! It sounds like something I might have done I was on the York team back in 2008 with three frankly odd by reasonably pleasant blokes We were eventually knocked out by St Andrews who had an entire round on American state flags...three of their four team members were American so had a slight advantage there
If anyone reading this happens to have a nerdy daughter at university who can think on her feet, please encourage her to apply - it did amazing things for my self-belief and it's still the main thing anyone ever mentions when discussing my CV

YANBU. Each team should be two male, two female - no excuses.

I was very impressed by the lad whose knowledge of Hamilton surpassed even my families the other week

I must be such an oddball as a woman who could answer a good few questions about cricket and classical music but went to the local comp.

Isn't it more that the nature of the questions favour male ability to recount tedious facts rather than the female tendency to actually analyse facts?

Is that a joke?