University Challenge – Britain’s best quiz show – is making its questions “gender neutral” to encourage more women to participate.
If you believe the show’s executive producer Peter Gwyn, this is a jolly good thing:
“Perhaps ‘gender-neutrality’ is what we aim for,” Mr Gwyn said. “We try to ensure that when hearing a question, we don’t have any sense of whether it was written by a man or a woman, just as questions should never sound as if they are directed more at men than women.
“We believe very strongly that the more representative, inclusive and diverse we can make the programme, the better and more interesting it will be.”
No it won’t make the programme better and more interesting. It’s a disaster.
We’ve already had a taste of this in the increasing preponderance of boring questions about obscure also-rans from history who have only made the cut by dint of the fact that they’ll help fill the programme’s gender quota. “Which composer of Fantasia on Crochet, rated by JS Bach as the third most-talented lutanist in Leipzig, first made her name…”
Yawn. No one cares. No one’s interested. There are only so many questions you can ask about famous people where the answer is Marie Curie – so let’s move on and accept the fact that almost everything notable in history that was done in science, literature, politics, war, religion or any other field was done by men.
Read the rest on Breitbart.
