Bringing In Girls....

[hhssteve]

I tought so, and that's why your post confused and scared me a little.

Congrats on Savannah Country Day, though. Three of us had a massive schedule conflict so we couldn't attend. It's a shame: looks like we would have met each other and had a crazy match. Where did Etowah come from to get to the finals? (no offense to Etowah, congrats, but when was their last finals appearance?) This thread might be a little misplaced, but oh well.

SCD still NAQT?

[jrbarry]

SCD Ty was NAQT questions. Dorman-A lost to Etowah in one semifinals. I know nothing about that match. Brookwood-B beat Dorman-B in a quarterfinal match (on a tiebreaker).

Etowah is a 4A school, I think, and could give y'all a run for the state 4A title IF THEY PLAY like they did at SCD. They played well and I feel it was no fluke.

Good luck at UGA Saturday. My kids will be at the State Beta Convention.

[insaneindian]

After just making the teams for DE State Tournament (on saturday jan 21)
i noticed that a lot of times, freshman girls arent comfortable playing with all guys on their teams. this made it a whole lot harder to make the teams (we have 6 teams ) but hey, you gotta "git-r-done"

[Hopesworth]

I am a co-captain on my team's varsity team. I am not your stereotypical quiz bowler as I also happen to cheer for my school. If Quick Recall didn't have such a reputation as it does I'm sure more girls would participate in it. That being said, our team has shattered all stereotypes and is a blend of all social classifications. However, whether or not this is accurate, Quiz Bowl doesn't appeal to many girls due to the omnipresence of guys and associations with "guys only stuff." I understand that completely; I feel out of place sometimes. The guys are all playing Halo while I'm flipping through Teen Vogue. ::Shrugs head:: I enjoy Quick Recall, but I really wish it appealed to more females.

[Summoned Skull]

We have only one girl on our team, which is unfortunate because our school has many extremely smart girls.

The problem is at our school we have a show choir, which all the smart girls are in, and which always conflicts with scholastic bowl.

For some reason, the girls tend to find show choir more glamourous. Go figure.

[Zip Zap Rap Pants]

On our top three teams (which are the only ones with really serious players on them) we have 4 girls, so trying to recruit more of them is not really an issue for us. However, the other day a thought came to mind about this topic...

When's the last time you saw a really fast female quizbowl player? I mean sure, there are plenty of girls who know a lot and can buzz in way before anybody else has a clue (props to national cathedral), but it's hard to find many who win most of the more obvious buzzer races. This brings to mind something on the Discovery channel I saw once about somebody who was going through a sex change by taking testosterone &c. and these researchers were looking into the more subtle effects of it. Turns out he/she/it/shim had much faster reflexes after taking hormones, so this reinforced what scientists had already believed: anatomically speaking, men usually have quicker nervous systems than women. So in other words, in a quizbowl tournament, when a male and a female player both know the answer and both make the decision to buzz at the exact same time, on average, the male player will win the buzzer race. So that may partly explain why you don't see as many highly successful teams that are mostly composed of girls.

[radiantradon]

Guys might have slightly faster reflexes, but I think that confidence, knowledge base, and ability will serve a player much better in the long run than a fast finger.

Also, the fact that I play unhealthy amounts of Tetris would probably make up for any differences in reflex time.

[zwtipp]

There is a girl at Walnut Hills in Ohio that was pretty good speedwise on the buzzer. THe one time I played against her, she got a bunch of the lightning round questions. We had already put the game away though, but still I rarely saw people that fast on the buzzer.

[First Chairman]

I think it's back to a weird confidence/inconfidence factor when it comes to boys and girls competing against each other. It's been shown that even when you put boys and girls in the same room taking a written test that the girls (in general) tend to perform poorer than when they are in the room with just girls.

Maybe it's a question that girls feel that they have to straddle a weird line between not showing off to be too much smarter than boys (because boys and girls don't consider it "cool") and not being completely embarrassed by being wrong so much. Getting girls to overcome the fear of how they would look to their peers is a real issue in general for teenagers (not that in general, boys don't have that problem, but they don't seem to care so much about it). Hence, the smart girls go to "show choir" because it's socially "the thing to do".

Don't we have a sociologist on this board?

Girls who were fast on the buzzer... I'm sure there are plenty currently. I can at least say "Vinita", "Julie", or "Amanda" to some of the people on this board and you'll get a lot of nodding heads.

[Captain Sinico]

Nothing like a bunch of crazy generalizations to explain everything, eh?

Anyway, Kelly Tourdot (now of UIUC) has always been pretty fast.

MaS

[First Chairman]

I know. We never engage in that sort of discussion on this board.

[solonqb]

Sara Garnett (formerly of Okemos, and now at UNC) was the fastest female player I've ever played against.

[Matt Weiner]

We had a (terrible) thread on the Yahoo a while ago sparked by this article, which appears light on science and heavy on made-up-from-whole-cloth "gender studies" type nonsense, but nonetheless exists:

http://www.prospect.org/print/V11/11/cohn-e.html

I suppose it's possible, for evolutionary reasons, that males have faster reflexes on average than females, although I don't know if that's actually been investigated in a scientific context. If it is true then, as I posted in the original thread, it's not only bad for quizbowl to write dumb buzzer-race questions instead of deeper knowledge-based questions, but outright sexist as well.

[STPickrell]

We had a (terrible) thread on the Yahoo a while ago sparked by this article, which appears light on science and heavy on made-up-from-whole-cloth "gender studies" type nonsense, but nonetheless exists:

http://www.prospect.org/print/V11/11/cohn-e.html

I suppose it's possible, for evolutionary reasons, that males have faster reflexes on average than females, although I don't know if that's actually been investigated in a scientific context. If it is true then, as I posted in the original thread, it's not only bad for quizbowl to write dumb buzzer-race questions instead of deeper knowledge-based questions, but outright sexist as well.

What if it's a female coach telling me questions are "too long?"

[First Chairman]

I suppose it's possible, for evolutionary reasons, that males have faster reflexes on average than females, although I don't know if that's actually been investigated in a scientific context. If it is true then, as I posted in the original thread, it's not only bad for quizbowl to write dumb buzzer-race questions instead of deeper knowledge-based questions, but outright sexist as well.

In terms of overall muscle strength, like lifting weights or doing strenuous physical activity, it's pretty well documented that (upon maturity) men have an advantage over women.

But we're talking about fast-twitch muscles in your thumb or fingers. I suppose it's possible, but we're not talking that people have to drink Gatorade and ice down their hands after an exhausting day of pressing a button.

[Captain Sinico]

See, here's the thing; I don't think speed is in the fingers, but in the mind. That's why I don't think one can systematically test quizbowl speed in any trivial way. Running an experiment where we say "buzz when the light comes on," for example, isn't going to give a good predictor of quizbowl speed because making the decision to buzz or not in a question is much more complicated than determining if a light's on, even in the case of the most trivial buzzer-races. I think the vast majority of the time you spend "buzzing" is time you spend deciding to buzz or not, so the speed with which you can do that will dominate the outcome, namely who gets in. In short, my observation is that, in any format that's not completely terrible (i.e. any one where every question isn't a one-clue wonder that you should just have your best player buzz first and guess on) speed is more speed in decisionmaking than in physically buzzing.
Personally, I know that my teammates consider me a a "fast player" or something, but I know that whatever prowess I have in speed is mostly because, on each question where I have a clue, I've said "Okay, one of these small number of things are the answer; I know what the uniquely identifying clues for them are; I'm now waiting for the first few sounds in one of those clues and when I hear one, I'll buzz with the answer," and then I do that. I know from what discussions I've had with other "fast" players that they operate in more or less the same way.
So, long story short, even if you could establish that female players are "slower" than males (which you can't, since there aren't any data here) I don't think you can find a simple physiological explanation for that, even if one exists (which it doesn't look like it does since, again, no data.) Further, since I've known a good number of female players that were as good as anyone else for their experience, I think the explanation for the dearth of women in some programs is really more explicable along social lines.

MaS

[First Chairman]

I also don't want it to be said that you can't teach speed either. You can definitely train people to overcome any inherent fears when it comes to reflexes.