Is This Fair

[lankeela]

"BBC Two's Mastermind presented by new host Clive Myrie is particularly interested in receiving applications from under-represented groups for the next series!"

Should they not take applications equally from everyone that applies?

[pixie374]

Tbh, Jim, I find quiz shows quite weighted towards men. Often male sports, male history, cars and so on... I know that sounds a generalisation, but if I made a TV quiz, I bet women would generally do better than men....

[pixie374]

Don't be silly, brainiac- too many irrationality there to even reply.

[Peter Pedant]

//widening the application field//
Has it been restricted in the past -

o god you gotta laugh at some of this !
I mean it is open mouthed gormlessness - even for Ab !

[naomi24]

What on earth is 'male history'?

[naomi24]

PP. Mastermind has restricted applications to white people only? Really? Tell me more.

[pixie374]

Erm... history of males. As we were all taught- wars, engineering, discoveries, inventions... the usual biases. The questions involving female history are a minority... just watch.

[jim360]

The problem with that answer, brainiac, is that you're treating Shaun Wallace as exceptional amongst bame people, when he clearly isn't, and in any case certainly shouldn't be.

[jim360]

"Tbh, Jim, I find quiz shows quite weighted towards men."

Also fair, but it does seem that some shows have tried to make an effort to ask a wider set of questions lately.

[naomi24]

Probably because, historically, female achievements were in the minority - and very much so. No point pretending otherwise.

[lankeela]

I think what is unfair is the presumption that we have to be given a range of contestants just to be 'fair' but in reality I never watch a programme and wonder why there is only one woman/person of colour/disabled on it - I am more interested in laughing at the stupid people no matter which demographic they are from.

[jim360]

Self-fulfilling prophecy, though. It isn't that difficult to construct quiz after quiz about women in history, or art, or music, or science. Just because they are often underappreciated doesn't mean it's the responsibility of a quiz to perpetuate that. And in any case, it stands to reason that a general knowledge quiz should always be seeking to push the boundaries of what counts as "general".

[pixie374]

Or unrecorded, naomi. Next time you watch a quiz show, purely out of interest... just record how many questions you see as "typically" male or female weighted. I would be interested to see what you think.

[Mamyalynne]

You wouldn't have had many laughs tonight then Lankeela, shame.

[naomi24]

Brainiac's answer was relevant.

So, Jim, I’ll ask again. Have applications been restricted in the past - and if so, how? Who was prevented from applying?

Pixie, You'll wait a long time. Absolute nonsense. History is history and you'll find far more men of note there than women. That is a fact of life that female warriors chomping at the bit need to acknowledge.

[naomi24]

I'll look back here in the morning. Night all.

[pixie374]

Who wrote it, naomi?

[jim360]

Like I said before, there's also the issue of perceptions. In the first place, if people see or treat anything as a closed shop then it tends to stay that way; in the second place, you'd be surprised how easy it can be to accidently create a closed shop whether you intended to or not. To take an artificial example, a pub quiz whose music round is exclusively 60s-80s is going to be off-putting to people who aren't interested in that period, and ought to broaden its question pool.

As to the point about the balance of history, etc. The problem is that there are *two* main sources of imbalance in representation, and only one of them is history itself; the other is who we choose to focus on, and that choice tends to (wildly) exaggerate the biases that are already there. The key is to ensure that you've eliminated the second as far as possible -- no, you cannot escape the first kind of bias, but you can't hide behind that either to pretend that the second kind doesn't exist. If a quizmaster chooses to ask questions mainly about Einstein, Newton, and Galileo, but forgets to ask about Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, or Emmy Noether, then they aren't doing justice to history.

[Spicerack]

My memory is shocking, Jim, but in the interest of fairness perhaps you could remind us. Er, just how many people of colour were on your University Challenge team?

[emmie]

it should be the best applicants for the programme, so what if people are under represented. I don;t care for positive discrimination at all.