Why do women quit quizbowl? Some actual answers

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Aaron's Rod
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Why do women quit quizbowl? Some actual answers

Post by Aaron's Rod »

(This is not directly related to current discussion going on in other threads and venues about misconduct and harassment, which I am actively reading and moderating and fully support.)

In the past, we’ve had community discussions about how to make quizbowl more approachable and inclusive. This is a difficult discussion to have without a lot of speculating and navel-gazing. The people who feel that quizbowl is unapproachable and exclusive don’t make their way to the forums. In the case of that thread, one person who did find their way to the forums was shouted down. (Scroll through that thread, really, it’s not great.)

Yesterday it occurred to me that those people are not on the forums, but they might be on a Facebook group called “Women of Jeopardy!”, for women who have appeared on Jeopardy.

(NB: There is a group for POC who have been on Jeopardy, which I am rightfully not in. If an eligible person would be interested in posting a similar topic in that group, I’m sure it would generate interesting discussion!)

I posted:
The quizbowl community (some of you may know NAQT, ACF, etc.) has a "leaky pipeline" problem when it comes to retaining women and POC. In the past, people have done a lot of speculating and hand-wringing over these demographic imbalances, but of course people who stopped playing quizbowl aren't in those conversations.

Did you ever play quizbowl and then quit? When did you play (MS/HS/college and what years?), what was your experience like, and why did you quit? Doesn't have to be for gendered etc. reasons, maybe you just didn't like it, just curious. I want to hear your story.

NOTE: I might discuss this in generalities in quizbowl spaces, e.g. "about 1/2 the people said they didn't continue in college because there was no team," but I wouldn't quote directly or anything without your individual, direct permission and anonymization.
I received over a hundred responses.

First of all, I should say that many, many women, including a couple of self-identified WOC, said that they had positive or fair experiences in high school quizbowl and did not continue solely because their college did not have a team. A couple said that they did play in college, but dropped out of college before completing a degree.

About a half-dozen women commented saying that they did not have quizbowl at their high schools and had never been on a team. Although this was not the original focus of my post, at least three of those people commented that they went to high schools that were “majority minority” (their words) or whose student populations were of low socioeconomic status, and they felt this contributed to their school’s lack of a team.

More than one woman commented that she didn't like how areas she was good in constituted "trash," and others felt that "trash" was gendered in a way that did not suit their interests.

A number of people commented that they had quit because of negative experiences. I selected a half-dozen comments that I thought were detailed enough to be illustrative, and got their authors’ permissions to anonymize and redact them and share them with you. I’m not necessarily sharing these out of agreement or endorsement, but to bring new perspectives to the community where they have sorely been lacking, especially on the topics of team atmosphere and a need for mentorship.

(NB 2: Age-wise, the demographics of Jeopardy contestants skews older than the quizbowl community, so there are several references to “College Bowl.”)
1 wrote: I was the captain of my high school's Quiz Bowl team which was all-female in its first year. In my freshman year at college, I put in a bit of time with the College Bowl team and found the group to be a) overwhelmingly male and b) extremely insular with seemingly little interest in bringing in new members.

We competed against mostly all-male teams in high school, so all-male trivia teams were a depressingly familiar phenomenon to me already. I had (have) just so incredibly little interest in spending my precious, irreplaceable time in this life hanging out with the kinds of dudes who would cultivate an all-male experience for themselves.

I chose instead to spend my time with various LGBTQ groups on campus instead and didn't participate in any kind of competitive trivia until pub trivia in grad school.

As an aside, many of my chosen pastimes in my college years took place in (then) male-dominated spaces - science fiction cons, beer festivals, snobby record shops, comics - and trivia dudes were the only ones I found obnoxious enough to make me reconsider the whole hobby.
This one interested me, so I asked her if she had anything in mind that separated trivia and quizbowl from those other spaces, or what made it so insular.
1, part 2 wrote: Some examples are:
-Established members occupying all the central seats in meetings, so they could chat more easily amongst themselves, while new would-be members were physically around the periphery trying to find a way to join in, to indicate shared interests, anything.

-They consistently had only established players playing during practices, even in early sessions when they would presumably be seeking new players.

-In-jokes galore. If you didn't get some random reference, knowing glances exchanged.

-It didn't help that the leadership was a couple of guys that appeared uncomfortable around f e m a l e s, the kind that tend to crop up in any sufficiently nerdy undertaking.

A teammate of mine from HS also tried and rapidly dropped our college's Quiz Bowl team, so it was not just me, a person who is very willing to quit things early over the slightest provocation (because if this is how they're acting when they're trying to recruit, how much worse will it be once you're in??).

I think the thing is that, as an example, if I find myself in a comic book store with insular male geek culture, I can look for another store that is less gross and annoying. With College Bowl, this one group is pretty much the only game in town, so if they are high on insular male geek culture, that's that for that.

I think it was really the lack of alternate spaces that did it for me though. A shitty record store staff, a gross harassment-filled con - there are alternatives, I can still read and enjoy the books, etc - but that's less of a possibility with sanctioned team-based competitive events.
2 wrote: I was the scholastic bowl varsity team captain starting my sophomore year of high school where I was one of two dominant players on our team (the other one was male). I sometimes got the vibe that the “star” of opposing teams, if it was a boy, didn’t take me seriously, but I was good enough to let my performance speak for itself. I loved it and was super competitive. I didn’t try out in college, though. The quiz bowl team at my college had a table set up on the quad on freshman orientation week, and it took me like 20 seconds of talking to them to realize it would be a bad fit - they were ALL ultra nerdy Sheldon-esque guys who seemed both fascinated and annoyed that I was a girl. As much as I liked scholastic bowl... no thanks.
3 wrote: [...] I stumbled across the [school] College Bowl team (such as it was) at the activity fair when I started there. We were not very good, though after my first year, we made more effort to practice and attend more tournaments. As a student organization, we must have had some faculty sponsor, but we didn't have a coach (in fact, I seem to recall drafting my classics professor to sign forms at some point). One HUGE positive was that the intramural competition my first year was one of the things that convinced me that I actually was good at trivia.

Outside competition, however...there were lots of inappropriate comments at tournaments.
There was even one person who had a blog with general QB commentary, but spent a lot of time commenting on the [appearances of] women of our team [...] Despite all that, I probably would have done more in that community if there had been someone guiding me/us, rather than just trying to figure out how to study and how/where to compete ourselves.
4 wrote: I played in high school, loved it. I was captain of our team sophomore through senior years. [...] I didn't last more than one or two semesters [in college] and I think the reason is that I just felt really out of my element. It was very different from h.s. QB. Everyone took college bowl SO SERIOUSLY. Not the teammates--who were great--but I didn't like losing points for wrong answers, I didn't like how intense the actual competitions were, and I didn't like having "areas" where you rang in only in your areas [...] Basically I had a major case of freshman nerves. I think if it had been explained to me how tournaments and scoring worked, what to expect, and if I could have worked out the jitters, and if there had been more positive reinforcement (I felt like the dumbest one on the team) I probably would have stuck it out.
5 wrote: I played college quiz bowl at [school] for about a month in 2017 and quit. I wouldn’t say that my experience was sexist per se but I was just very turned off by the culture. The main things I didn’t like:
1. The simultaneous disdain for “trash” while people also wanted me on their team because I was good at that stuff. Heard a lot of other people at [school] trashing sports and then telling me how great I was to have around when I got an easy baseball question.
2. The general arrogance in quiz bowl — how QB people think they’re better than everyone else because their canon is academic and therefore the only “real trivia.”
There were also other reasons — I was turned off when I realized good players studied like 20 hours a week on top of studying for schoolwork, which I found ridiculous and which told me I was more cut out for pub trivia or LL [LearnedLeague] than QB. (I will note here too that I currently work 30 hours a week for [another activity] so I’m one to talk, but I think I just thought it was gonna be for me and then it wasn’t.) I was also part of other activities that conflicted with QB so I had to choose which activities I liked best.
6 wrote: I was the only female on varsity quiz bowl in high school (there were a couple of jv players that were two or three grades behind me) and captained the team senior year (1995-1998). When we'd go to high school tournaments at [college], the male college bowl moderators were jerks to the females on the teams (particularly one who'd been on College J!). So when I went to [same college] for college, I had no interest in college bowl.
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emma88
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Re: Why do women quit quizbowl? Some actual answers

Post by emma88 »

Aaron's Rod wrote: Wed Jul 15, 2020 3:38 pm (This is not directly related to current discussion going on in other threads and venues about misconduct and harassment, which I am actively reading and moderating and fully support.)

In the past, we’ve had community discussions about how to make quizbowl more approachable and inclusive. This is a difficult discussion to have without a lot of speculating and navel-gazing. The people who feel that quizbowl is unapproachable and exclusive don’t make their way to the forums. In the case of that thread, one person who did find their way to the forums was shouted down. (Scroll through that thread, really, it’s not great.)

Yesterday it occurred to me that those people are not on the forums, but they might be on a Facebook group called “Women of Jeopardy!”, for women who have appeared on Jeopardy.

(NB: There is a group for POC who have been on Jeopardy, which I am rightfully not in. If an eligible person would be interested in posting a similar topic in that group, I’m sure it would generate interesting discussion!)

I posted:
The quizbowl community (some of you may know NAQT, ACF, etc.) has a "leaky pipeline" problem when it comes to retaining women and POC. In the past, people have done a lot of speculating and hand-wringing over these demographic imbalances, but of course people who stopped playing quizbowl aren't in those conversations.

Did you ever play quizbowl and then quit? When did you play (MS/HS/college and what years?), what was your experience like, and why did you quit? Doesn't have to be for gendered etc. reasons, maybe you just didn't like it, just curious. I want to hear your story.

NOTE: I might discuss this in generalities in quizbowl spaces, e.g. "about 1/2 the people said they didn't continue in college because there was no team," but I wouldn't quote directly or anything without your individual, direct permission and anonymization.
I received over a hundred responses.

First of all, I should say that many, many women, including a couple of self-identified WOC, said that they had positive or fair experiences in high school quizbowl and did not continue solely because their college did not have a team. A couple said that they did play in college, but dropped out of college before completing a degree.

About a half-dozen women commented saying that they did not have quizbowl at their high schools and had never been on a team. Although this was not the original focus of my post, at least three of those people commented that they went to high schools that were “majority minority” (their words) or whose student populations were of low socioeconomic status, and they felt this contributed to their school’s lack of a team.

More than one woman commented that she didn't like how areas she was good in constituted "trash," and others felt that "trash" was gendered in a way that did not suit their interests.

A number of people commented that they had quit because of negative experiences. I selected a half-dozen comments that I thought were detailed enough to be illustrative, and got their authors’ permissions to anonymize and redact them and share them with you. I’m not necessarily sharing these out of agreement or endorsement, but to bring new perspectives to the community where they have sorely been lacking, especially on the topics of team atmosphere and a need for mentorship.

(NB 2: Age-wise, the demographics of Jeopardy contestants skews older than the quizbowl community, so there are several references to “College Bowl.”)
1 wrote: I was the captain of my high school's Quiz Bowl team which was all-female in its first year. In my freshman year at college, I put in a bit of time with the College Bowl team and found the group to be a) overwhelmingly male and b) extremely insular with seemingly little interest in bringing in new members.

We competed against mostly all-male teams in high school, so all-male trivia teams were a depressingly familiar phenomenon to me already. I had (have) just so incredibly little interest in spending my precious, irreplaceable time in this life hanging out with the kinds of dudes who would cultivate an all-male experience for themselves.

I chose instead to spend my time with various LGBTQ groups on campus instead and didn't participate in any kind of competitive trivia until pub trivia in grad school.

As an aside, many of my chosen pastimes in my college years took place in (then) male-dominated spaces - science fiction cons, beer festivals, snobby record shops, comics - and trivia dudes were the only ones I found obnoxious enough to make me reconsider the whole hobby.
This one interested me, so I asked her if she had anything in mind that separated trivia and quizbowl from those other spaces, or what made it so insular.
1, part 2 wrote: Some examples are:
-Established members occupying all the central seats in meetings, so they could chat more easily amongst themselves, while new would-be members were physically around the periphery trying to find a way to join in, to indicate shared interests, anything.

-They consistently had only established players playing during practices, even in early sessions when they would presumably be seeking new players.

-In-jokes galore. If you didn't get some random reference, knowing glances exchanged.

-It didn't help that the leadership was a couple of guys that appeared uncomfortable around f e m a l e s, the kind that tend to crop up in any sufficiently nerdy undertaking.

A teammate of mine from HS also tried and rapidly dropped our college's Quiz Bowl team, so it was not just me, a person who is very willing to quit things early over the slightest provocation (because if this is how they're acting when they're trying to recruit, how much worse will it be once you're in??).

I think the thing is that, as an example, if I find myself in a comic book store with insular male geek culture, I can look for another store that is less gross and annoying. With College Bowl, this one group is pretty much the only game in town, so if they are high on insular male geek culture, that's that for that. I would also prefer going to store where women wears hippie dress available on Boho Life as this would make me more comfotable.

I think it was really the lack of alternate spaces that did it for me though. A shitty record store staff, a gross harassment-filled con - there are alternatives, I can still read and enjoy the books, etc - but that's less of a possibility with sanctioned team-based competitive events.
2 wrote: I was the scholastic bowl varsity team captain starting my sophomore year of high school where I was one of two dominant players on our team (the other one was male). I sometimes got the vibe that the “star” of opposing teams, if it was a boy, didn’t take me seriously, but I was good enough to let my performance speak for itself. I loved it and was super competitive. I didn’t try out in college, though. The quiz bowl team at my college had a table set up on the quad on freshman orientation week, and it took me like 20 seconds of talking to them to realize it would be a bad fit - they were ALL ultra nerdy Sheldon-esque guys who seemed both fascinated and annoyed that I was a girl. As much as I liked scholastic bowl... no thanks.
3 wrote: [...] I stumbled across the [school] College Bowl team (such as it was) at the activity fair when I started there. We were not very good, though after my first year, we made more effort to practice and attend more tournaments. As a student organization, we must have had some faculty sponsor, but we didn't have a coach (in fact, I seem to recall drafting my classics professor to sign forms at some point). One HUGE positive was that the intramural competition my first year was one of the things that convinced me that I actually was good at trivia.

Outside competition, however...there were lots of inappropriate comments at tournaments.
There was even one person who had a blog with general QB commentary, but spent a lot of time commenting on the [appearances of] women of our team [...] Despite all that, I probably would have done more in that community if there had been someone guiding me/us, rather than just trying to figure out how to study and how/where to compete ourselves.
4 wrote: I played in high school, loved it. I was captain of our team sophomore through senior years. [...] I didn't last more than one or two semesters [in college] and I think the reason is that I just felt really out of my element. It was very different from h.s. QB. Everyone took college bowl SO SERIOUSLY. Not the teammates--who were great--but I didn't like losing points for wrong answers, I didn't like how intense the actual competitions were, and I didn't like having "areas" where you rang in only in your areas [...] Basically I had a major case of freshman nerves. I think if it had been explained to me how tournaments and scoring worked, what to expect, and if I could have worked out the jitters, and if there had been more positive reinforcement (I felt like the dumbest one on the team) I probably would have stuck it out.
5 wrote: I played college quiz bowl at [school] for about a month in 2017 and quit. I wouldn’t say that my experience was sexist per se but I was just very turned off by the culture. The main things I didn’t like:
1. The simultaneous disdain for “trash” while people also wanted me on their team because I was good at that stuff. Heard a lot of other people at [school] trashing sports and then telling me how great I was to have around when I got an easy baseball question.
2. The general arrogance in quiz bowl — how QB people think they’re better than everyone else because their canon is academic and therefore the only “real trivia.”
There were also other reasons — I was turned off when I realized good players studied like 20 hours a week on top of studying for schoolwork, which I found ridiculous and which told me I was more cut out for pub trivia or LL [LearnedLeague] than QB. (I will note here too that I currently work 30 hours a week for [another activity] so I’m one to talk, but I think I just thought it was gonna be for me and then it wasn’t.) I was also part of other activities that conflicted with QB so I had to choose which activities I liked best.
6 wrote: I was the only female on varsity quiz bowl in high school (there were a couple of jv players that were two or three grades behind me) and captained the team senior year (1995-1998). When we'd go to high school tournaments at [college], the male college bowl moderators were jerks to the females on the teams (particularly one who'd been on College J!). So when I went to [same college] for college, I had no interest in college bowl.
Many of the stories shared in the post above illustrate the importance of creating an atmosphere of inclusivity, acceptance, and support for all participants in Quizbowl, regardless of gender, race, or background. It is clear that negative experiences and attitudes from other participants can be off-putting and lead many to quit the activity, which is a shame.

In order to make Quizbowl more welcoming and encouraging to all participants, it is important to foster an attitude of respect and friendliness at tournaments and other Quizbowl events. It is also important to make sure that all teams, regardless of gender, race, or background, have access to resources and support in order to ensure that they can succeed and feel comfortable participating. Finally, it is important to provide mentors and coaches who can guide participants to success and help them build meaningful relationships with other Quizbowlers.

By creating an atmosphere of acceptance, respect, and support, Quizbowl can become an activity that is approachable and welcoming to all.
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