In Jeopardy: What are the Real Differences Between Men & Women? (2024)

So my initial impression of the breathless coverage of Amy Schneider’s win onJeopardy! was that it was just a fabricated story to give theNYT a chance to use the word “female” in a headline describing the accomplishments of a male-bodied human being. I know! They used not “woman” but full-on “female”, so I’m not sure what word is left in the Times lexicon to describe the existence of a biological fact, regardless of how you feel about gender as a social construct.

It didn’t occur to me on seeing the headlines that a quiz show was one of those things where sex or gender had any bearing on results. I was wrong. Here are a few links I dug up about the on-going problem Jeopardy! has with, for some reason or another, men, on average, out-winning women on the game show:

• “What is sexism, Alex”: Close the “Jeopardy” gender gap! September 29, 2013.
• Do Men Wager More Than Women in Jeopardy? A Slate Investigation. March 5, 2014.
• Trivia Tactics: Analyzing Trivia Show Participants and Episodes Over Time (undated) (This is a study of women’s and men’s betting patterns by Casino.org)
• What’s Behind the Unprecedented Run of Female Jeopardy! Winners? May 29, 2014: Suddenly women start out-scoring men. Hmmn. Right after a press push about gender outcomes, the show manages to suddenly have a bunch of female winners.
• Women Just Can’t Seem to Win on Jeopardy April 11, 2016. Oops. It’s back.
• Over 33 seasons of Jeopardy!, men have earned nearly double what women have February 1, 2017.
• ‘Jeopardy!’: Why the Show Was Accused of Gender Bias July 16, 2020.

There are some interesting findings in just this initial foray into the question of gender differences in game show outcomes.

For some more background, Emily DeArdo has neatly gathered her Jeopardy! experiences here. Something important to note is that youaudition for the show. You take qualifying quizzes that give the show information about your ability to succeed at a trivia quiz, but they don’t just put the top three scorers onto stage. The showselects a combination of players that will make a good show.

–> Survival of TV is about entertaining you, in order to keep selling advertising space (or subscriptions, depending) so a roster of players who will draw in viewers is the #1 imperative. Not a surprise here.

As a result though, it’s possible for the selection crew to knowingly fill a roster slanted towards allowing a given player to win. If you want to build tension with a long winning streak, then put your highest-performing player from auditions on the stage with relatively low-scoring players, allow the wins to stack up, and then start bringing on other higher-scoring players when you’re ready to end the streak in a high-tension match. If you want to see a sympathetic player succeed (audiences will much prefer the “good guy” winning), fill the roster to favor that outcome.

And of course, from the other end, as the articles exploring the gender-disparity question explain, quiz-question writers have control over what kinds of categories they develop and what questions they ask. So it’s entirely possible to attempt to steer victory towards the kind of people who would be more likely to have certain kinds of information. You could make a given game slanted towards scientists, or literary types, or whatever you like. The show can, without any cheating during the game itself, have quite a bit of sway over which type of contestants are more likely to win.

Likewise you can control just how difficult each $ category is, so it’s possible to create a show that tends towards relatively lower or higher total winnings, especially by playing around with the difficulty of the questions in the mid-level dollar values. Managing this dynamically over the course of a season and over the course of the lifetime of the show allows attention-grabbing headlines and emotion-thrilling stakesthat encourage viewers to keep tuning in.

All of that is just show business stuff.

Some of that show business stuff, though, uncovers what might be some interesting findings about sex and gender differences. Questions raised:

• Are there differences in average processing speed and reaction times between men and women that affect game outcomes?
• Are there differences in the typical knowledge base between male and female trivia buffs?
• Are there in fact sex-based differences in game strategizing? (Regardless of whether the strategy differences have an impact on play outcomes — still very interesting!)
• Are there genuine psychological differences (that “competitive” vs “cooperative”) between men and women that affect game play?
• Are there sex-based differences in socialization or in innate psychological factors that affect who auditions for quiz shows in the first place?
• Are we seeing the result of variations in the IQ distribution between males and females? And if so, is that because men and women have a different distribution of average intelligence in some meaningful way that affects real life, or is it because IQ tests are a lot like game shows?
• Are there societal factors affecting the education of girls and boys that influence which sex is more likely in adulthood to perform well on quiz-based competitions? Does the content of the quiz or the fact ofbeing a quiz have more sway in that outcome?
• And, of course, are there social or even innate psychological factors that affect the behavior of the show-organizers in a way that, perhaps, creates gender bias? Does it actually matter whether the question writers are male or female, for example?

Loads of fascinating questions about what differences exist, on average, between male and female brains and bodies, and how we get that way. On the face of it, the ability to answer trivia questions doesn’tseem like something that should display a gender disparity. And yet, as the history of Critical Jeopardy!Studies indicates, sure enough a sex-based outcome disparity exists.

This, in turn, is what makes calling Amy Schneider the “top-scoring female contestant” not just nonsense but double-nonsense. It’s ridiculous to use the word “female” to describe someone with a male body, regardless of that person’s social habits, because “female” is a word with a biological meaning, and Schneider’s body has a biological reality rooted in being male. Dismiss that as mere politics if you like, but it would be nice to know if we’re just not going to have any words at all for distinguishing the two sexes of our sexually-dimorphic species. How exactly do you do science when you’ve just eliminated the words that science uses to distinguish, er, male and female?

But the double-nonsense is not a vocabulary problem but a reality-problem: Schneider can’t be part of the direct study group for all these questions related to sex, gender, and quiz show outcomes between males and females. If we’re asking a sociological question, Schneider simply is not a person with a lifetime history of experiencing what females experience in our time and place. If we’re asking a biological question, Schneider simply is not a person with a lifetime history of female biology.

In contrast, Schneider and other transgender persons could be very informative for trying to parse out how various aspects of being transgender inform the social and biological dynamics noted between men and women. This is because being a person who is born one sex and then takes on the outward social role of the opposite sex has a different social experience than someone who lives his or her life entirely within his or her own sex-based gender identity; likewise, medically, there may be some meaningful findings about how male and female brains change when exposed to various interventions that alter the body’s hormonal functioning.

So Amy Schneider as atransgender person may have something useful to add to the discussion of male and female performance disparities onJeopardy! But to frame Schneider’s results as a “female” record is to pose an important question (Why do females, on average, perform more poorly on the game show?) and then suddenly drop the topic and refuse to look any more deeply into what makes the female experience different from the male.

Photo: Male and female Superb Fairy Wren by benjamint444, CC 3.0.