University Challenge strives for ‘gender neutral’ quiz
Television producers aim to rework questions to encourage more women to appear on programme
THE BBC’S University Challenge is to introduce “gender neutral” questions following complaints from viewers, it has emerged.
The quiz show’s executive producer has said that ideally, questions should be framed in such a way that it would not even be possible to tell whether they were written by a man or a woman.
Peter Gwyn said he hoped this would encourage more female contestants to take part in the show, which has come under fire for its gender imbalance.
“Perhaps ‘gender-neutrality’ is what we aim for,” Mr Gwyn said. “We try to ensure that when hearing a question, we don’t have any sense of whether it was written by a man or a woman, just as questions should never sound as if they are directed more at men than women.
“We believe very strongly that the more representative, inclusive and diverse we can make the programme, the better and more interesting it will be.”
He said the move came after a viewer wrote in to complain about how few questions were about women.
“We agreed and decided to rectify it,” Mr Gwyn told Radio Times. “And we will always do everything we can to encourage more women to take part as contestants.”
He said that gender parity is one of many balances that question writers aim to achieve along with the right mixture of arts and sciences or contemporary and historical themes.
Earlier this year, Thomas Benson, the BBC Two show’s questions editor, said that there had been an effort to equalise the gender imbalance in the quiz. That was notable during this year’s final, which featured a round on female artists and a series of questions about noted US author Willa Cather.
Contestants also faced a music round on Marin Alsop, the first woman to conduct the Last Night of the Proms, and bonus questions on Anna Komnene, a Byzantine historian and princess.
Previously in the series there have been bonus rounds on “prominent women”, including writers, philosophers, pilots and golfers, as well as women born in the 1870s and 80s.
St Hugh’s College, Oxford has faced criticism for fielding four male students on the show, despite the institution being originally founded as a women’s college in 1886.
University Challenge host Jeremy Paxman even remarked on air about the all-men team, saying: “We could be forgiven for thinking they’d rather taken it [St Hugh’s] over.”
After the show aired, Wadham College, Oxford decided to introduce single-sex trials to guarantee that at least one female was on its team. However, after three weeks of try-outs, the college backtracked amid fears that selecting a woman with lower scores than male counterparts would be seen as “tokenistic”.