Eggheads quiz - lack of women in the questions!

[nestoftables]

Don't usually watch Eggheads but I am now 17 minutes into the half hour quiz show and many rounds in, and only one question so far has mentioned women in either the questions or answers. Rounds on sport, film and TV and science etc. and so many questions about men!

Quizogyny in action. Once you notice the imbalance in quiz questions you won't stop seeing it.

Yeah I wondered if I just hadn't paid attention before but once I noticed I was shocked. I don't think there was another question featuring women in the rest of the programme either.

Counting the ratio is really revealing on these things.

A year back I started counting the ratio of women’s to men’s in the sports section of the guardian front page online.

It was 6 months before the first time there were an equal number.

And the modal ratio was 5:1 over a year

Marginally better lately, but it’s got a long way to shift to get close to parity.

There has never been more on women than men on any occasion I’ve checked, which is most days.

Do you think with quizzes it may be partially to do with sources being weighted heavily towards men? Eg ratio of wiki entries, biographies, news reporting etc.

It's one of the reasons why I like Pointless. Yes, it can vary between episodes, but there are a good number of questions on women's sport, and questions on artists, scientists, writers etc always feature both sexes.

And they have questions on things that are (arguably) female-dominated pastimes such as knitting, dressmaking

@CrossPurposes

Quizogyny in action. Once you notice the imbalance in quiz questions you won't stop seeing it.

Quizogyny is a brilliant and apt description CrossPurposes. Apparently many more men than women apply to be on quiz shows. I am sure the type of questions that are asked reinforces this. Pointless does better than most at having a broader range of topics and I think the gender balance among contestants is more even.

The other thing that is really noticeable in Pointless is that if there is a question on eg tennis players, you are likely to do better (that is choose an answer selected by fewer people), if you choose a woman player for your answer. It's not just sport. The same would apply to questions about politicians or Oscar winners.

A fair few years ago I was on a game show, four contestants, I was the only female. I got knocked out first, c'est la vie, not the first time, but when watching it later EVERY question was really male orientated, (and I was an engineer so lived in a male world). I was quite annoyed after watching it, it was so patently obvious 😡

The other thing that is really noticeable in Pointless is that if there is a question on eg tennis players, you are likely to do better (that is choose an answer selected by fewer people), if you choose a woman player for your answer. It's not just sport. The same would apply to questions about politicians or Oscar winners

Very true.

OTOH I saw a man choose women's athletics as his jackpot question and hit 3 pointless answers with champion women javelin throwers. We can't patch the whole world, but seeing a round like that gave me hope that you can get entertaining airtime for all sorts of stuff, and good on (peaktime) Pointless for being one of the best.

Impossible (lunchtime BBC quiz) is usuallyma reasonable mix too

To be fair I didn't invent the word: www.etsy.com/uk/shop/Quizogyny

Quizogyny and Impossible. Not seen either before. Thanks crosspurposes and AuntieStella.

Watching Glastonbury last night, Brit pop and the 90s and I only saw two female singers in about 4 hours of tv. Catalonia and elastica.

Kinnikie's stage sank. Brief image of kylie and Shirley bassey.

They kept choosing shit songs by some of the bands too so they could have made some other editorial decisions around including women.

I believe skunkanansie was on somewhere but didn't see that but. She was narrating for a while.

It's noticeable on University Challenge that they have a lot more 'Women Answers' rounds - often the contestents aren't very good at them

DH and I found it v obvious and apparently it's a conscious effort by the question writers to make it more balanced, and get more female quizzers.

Are there any where the question setters are female? I cannot think of one where the quiz setter has been named.

On the re-runs of Millionaire (yes, I know I'm pathetic) they sometimes have a question for the 'fastest finger first' which is female friendly with more women contestants - still a man gets through first.

On The Chase the Beastie Boy has been felled by a knitting question.

@newnortherner111

Are there any where the question setters are female? I cannot think of one where the quiz setter has been named.

Question setters are not usually named,

There was a QI Elves team on Only Connect (and perhaps other shows). They set the questions for QI and are researchers for other shows too. One of the team of 4 on the show was a woman, and from the 25 on their website, 8 are women.

I have no idea if this is typical.