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).

I was on recently and was the only girl on the team.

I don't think it's sexist in itself; when it's filmed the people running it are a mixture, and there's one man and one woman looking after the teams before you play. The questions always seemed a good mix to me too.

External things are more of a problem though.

As a girl you definitely stand out more. There was one episode where I didn't get a starter, and quite a few people mentioned it online. At least two of the others that match didn't either, but because they're all boys, 2 out of 7 just isn't quite as noticeable.

Twitter is awful — I couldn't keep up with which of the boys on my team I was meant to be sleeping with! I don't think the boys get that quite as badly, but some of the comments on appearance and mannerisms could be quite upsetting.

At my university we were selected with a written quiz (done with matric numbers so they won't know your sex) then a spoken question buzzer round for the top 16. We had four girls in that, and ended up with one on the team, so those proportions were about the same. I'm not sure about the numbers doing the first round though. I know that the quiz society at my university is very male-heavy, and they promote it heavily, so maybe more boys who are well-practised at quizzing hear about it?

It would be ridiculous to have quotas of men and women. The programme doesn't work unless universities allowed to put forward their best teams regardless of sex.

This may not be very relevant since I didn't grow up in the UK, but I used to quiz in my middle school years.. but once I got to high school and beyond I found the quiz team to be a cesspit of geeky misogyny and sexism. Most of the male quizzers I know from back then are just awkward maladjusted men who don't know how to talk to a real life girl without resorting to stereotypes rooted in pornography or Madonna/whore tropes since that was their sole exposure to women. I hated it and moved to debate instead.

It's obviously not the only reason women are underrepresented, but I'm an engineer and a scientist and I haven't seen as much sexism in my professional fields or undergraduate classrooms as I saw in the quizzing milieu. Could be one contributing factor.

Agreed, Zaphod.

Male nerds always like to play the victim despite them being the most woman hating type of male there is.

Obviously women don't want to be on it because the team on the lower half of the screen would be able to look up their skirts.

I was on it as a student - about 20 years ago now! - and there were several women on my team. I remember that the makeup ladies were delighted and said they rarely got to make up women for the show. We only got through a few rounds, but all the other teams were almost exclusively male. I watched it the other week (don't normally), and was really disappointed to see that nothing much had changed. They selected us via a series of multiple choice exams, so I wonder if women just don't apply in the same numbers as men. And maybe they don't take it quite as seriously - in my team we didn't really prepare, we all just went along for a good time and the experience, but the men, it turned out, had all been practising for ages and were very very competitive!

It would be ridiculous to have quotas of men and women. The programme doesn't work unless universities allowed to put forward their best teams regardless of sex

This comes up a lot. But I think the idea is that if there are factors keeping women from engaging, quotas can weaken them.

I do believe that intelligence has been shown to be evenly spread amongst the sexes, so the make up of the contestants, as is, would indicate something more at work here.

I think women may well be more wary of exposing themselves to the views of social media, frankly. There was a pretty blonde contestant whose name I can't remember who had a lot of hassle recently.....

You need to look at the type of people applying to university challenge. The amount of effort required just to get on TV usually discounts anyone with friends and an active social life unless they really want to get on TV - it's why only the geekiest losers ever apply and tbh more men are geeky losers than women. (I say this as someone who has been asked many a time to join the uni challenge team at the OU).

at Paxman saying they try but no women apply. I am involved in a lot of work trying to broaden diversity across the board and it's a constant job to point out to organisations and people who say 'I tried to recruit more [insert minority] people but they don't apply' that they should think about trying something different rather than implicitly blaming that minority for resisting their efforts.

There is an online quizzing forum on which I have seen 'quizzers' themselves discussing why so few women get involved across the board. Quite a few have suggested that the tendency to enjoy memorising long lists of FACTS is a more male characteristic (borne out in the tiny data set that is my own family). As tellingly, it has been suggested it's because there are so many sport rounds (because of course sport is perfect for offering lots and lots of facts around dates and teams and grounds etc) and there should be more soap opera rounds for women. The community view of women that that sort of statement reveals is perhaps as big as reason as any other.

I like quizzes. I'm good at them. It's a bit depressing how often in my life men have got cross because I've beaten them at Triv or surprised that I know things. I am also very good at remembering stuff for exams in a way that is stereotypically male, and enjoy that more than writing and analysing. I note that with the return to 'old-style' GCSEs without coursework, our boys are back on top in the results.

As an aside, surely unis should be looking beyond picking the top four scorers for their teams and ensuring they have a broad coverage of all the subject areas? Which then introduces subjectivity into the selection method.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2034596/Female-University-Challenge-contestants-seek-help-suffering-online-hate-campaigns.html

Sorry it's the daily mail but this is probably what puts alot of female contestants off.

I agree ferried, I think that in practice a well balanced team works better than just picking the top 4 from the test which might leave you with 4 identical 20 year old male English English students.

The perfect team will have at least one woman, (almost no men have ever read What Katy Did and only the ones who actually work in fashion can identify a raglan sleeve from a picture), an older person, and at least one person from overseas, ideally an American who will sail through the questions about random 19th century Presidents and maybe a South or East Asian or a Central European.

It doesn't matter if the women miss the rugby questions on the test or the person who moved to the UK aged 18 can't name any Blue Peter presenters if the other members of the team can pick that up.

However it's not too difficult to arrange that objectively - you set a really long broad ranging test, you set a cutoff entry criterion to find people who are basically competent and then you choose the permutation of 4 people who got the highest total number of questions right between them.

Of course it's not sexism. And as for the men knowing the cricketers - I should think cricket fans (of any sex) would know the cricketers.

People really need to look at the bigger issues in life.

"Today 07:15 AtHomeDadGlos

Of course it's not sexism. And as for the men knowing the cricketers - I should think cricket fans (of any sex) would know the cricketers.

How can you be so sure it isn't sexism?

People really need to look at the bigger issues in life.
Some of us are able to look at bigger issues and smaller ones. And understand how they are interconnected

There was one episode where I didn't get a starter, and quite a few people mentioned it online

If I were on any game show, I would hate to look at the Twitter comments. Some people can be awful and judgemental.

Hope you enjoyed it.

I've thought it's sexist for years in terms of the composition of the teams.

I note that with the return to 'old-style' GCSEs without coursework, our boys are back on top in the results.

Do you have stats for that? Because from what I've read, for the two gcses reformed so far, in English (which used to have a lot of assessed coursework), girls have pulled even further ahead than boys. Boys did get a bit further ahead of girls in maths (note that gap is almost an order of magnitude smaller) but there was never any assessed coursework for that anyway.

www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/gcse-results-2017-girls-maintain-lead-over-boys-despite-new-linear

It will be interesting to see as more reformed gcses are rolled out whether English is anomalous or if the exam v coursework thing is a bit of a myth.

Are Bakeoff or Sewing Bee sexist DrDre? Quizzing is a hobby enjoyed by more men than women.

Recreational quiz shows like Pointless are free to rebalance that bias and choose the teams they put on screen based on TV representational quotas (to be clear, I think that's good and fine) but once you get to an elite competitive level the greater numbers of men in the pool will start to tell. AFAIK the UC producers do try to balance things out as far as they can, so a decent team with a woman will be picked over a decent all male team but they can only work with what they've got.

Fewer women on UC! 'Sexism!'

Maybe fewer women apply for the teams, or the men are brighter?

Screaming sexism is hysterical.

It's unlikely that the men are all brighter than women, and the question is
WHY fewer women apply.
Nobody is either screaming or hysterical but than you for the misogyny and mansplaining

I don't think you are BU, I've thought UC is sexist for a very long time.

I also think Oxford and Cambridge should just put a team in each. It's "university" challenge, not "college" challenge. And no, I don't think they'd automatically win, other unis have plenty of intelligent students with good general knowledge.

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? Certainly when courses have a larger coursework element, female outcomes improve. The current trend of doing away with coursework and having exam-only testing is to reverse the perceived unfairness as girls are doing better than boys academically (the horror!)

Is this re ally true or is it one of those fallacies? I am definitely better at exams than coursework and was always quite good at retaining useless facts, too. I was on my school general knowledge team (all girls, but we did beat the boys from time to time!)

Maybe fewer women apply for the teams

If you'd RTFT, you would know its clear that fewer women apply. The question is why? I'm inclined to accept UC itself doesn't want to be sexist - the problem is due to ingrained sexism in society.

If you want to engage in civilized discussion with women, maybe refresh your memory on the derivation of the word 'hysterical' and try to avoid it?

Is this really true or is it one of those fallacies?
See my link purple - the limited evidence of this years english GCSE indicates fallacy.

screaming sexist is hysterical?
now that's sexism right there