I'm going to do something unusual in these mailing list circle jerks. I'm going to cite actual data rather than stick to making up some psychobabble. I looked at a tournament with a large number of players, the 2002 NAQT HSNCT and examined the individual results. There are 275 players with individuals stats. Of that number, I would say about 50 have names that are obviously female. Additionally, there are about 20 have names of indeterminate names, be the un-sexable names like Kelly or Tracy, initials, foreign names, or other names I have never heard of. I looked at the 2003 NAQT ICT. In D1, I would have broken it down as 104 clearly male, 12 clearly female, and 1 indeterminate gender. D2 breaks down similarly as 105-21-8. Male female gender ratios go from 4:1 in high school, to 5:1 in D2 to 9:1 in D1. These numbers may not hold if we examined all players at all levels, but I am going to go with the working assumption that there are real shifts in these ratios going from one level to another. What does this mean? I am going to make another assumption, which is that the majority of collegiate players played in high school. I'm going to assert that this was the case at least with my old school and use unreliable anecdotal evidence to suggest that this tends to be the case among quizbowlers I know. I suggest that part of the explanation for the uneven gender ratio in collegiate quizbowl lies in the uneven gender ratio that exists in high school. Chris Borglum noted that at the CC level, at least in Florida, recruitment is done by faculty recommendation. It would seem that those faculty members are generally not sexist in their recommendations. If this is how some high schools recruit players, it is possible that high school teachers are more biased. Then again, there could be other explanations. There are possibilities in the shift in ratios from D2 to D1. I can only do more guesswork, which is what everyone else is doing anyways. It's possible that women are more prone to drop off of a quizbowl team than men. I can think of several explanations. One is that questions have an inherent male bias and that female players feel less connected to the subject matter that comes up. (Charlie Steinhice instituted recognition of "Title IX All-Stars" under this assumption.) If one believes that women are more interested in socializing as groups, it's possible that those teams that hang out together and are friends outside of quizbowl are more likely to retain female players. It may be that women are less inclined to stick it out in a male-dominated activity (not because they can't hack it, but because a college environment gives them other equally attractive options for extracurriculars). Maybe it's just that quizbowl is for dorks and women are inherently less dorky than men. I'm not saying that I believe any of those reasons, but I can see other people making the case for some of these options. And that should be enough for now to set people off on another round of discussions. Anthony, the best Filipino-American quizbowler ever
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