Jane Thynne relates how the quiz culture is booming but are women interested?

Quiz culture is booming in Britain. For every accusation that we are a dumbed-down nation with plummeting IQs, there is a school hall or rugby club packed with people saying, "Brunelleschi, surely?" or "Terza rima!" There are huddles of adults arguing over the tallest mountain in America and the chemical symbol for tin.

But wait a minute. Look around the pubs and school halls, the celebrity quizzes, the clueless students of University Challenge, the whey-faced experts of Mastermind, the pedants of Brain of Britain, and there is one question that no one can answer: Where are the women?

Quiz culture is largely a male domain, yet it is hard to see why. Is shouting "Henry II, idiot!" atavistic male display, like peacock tail-fanning? Does a man's brain contain extra storage space for the dates of 19th-century prime ministers? When faced with questions beginning "Which Soviet athlete in the 1976 Olympics . . ." do women simply tune out?

Well, of course not. As a confirmed quiz fanatic who turns to Trivial Pursuit each Christmas like crack cocaine, I will take any quiz, no matter how trifling, and seize the opportunity to sit in a stuffy hall arguing about the Estonian flag. Yet I have to admit most of my team-mates are men.

Such gender imbalance in a fast-growing area of popular culture is causing dismay in high places. "It's a real problem at the BBC," sighs Dawn Ellis, a veteran Radio 4 quiz producer. "We have people sitting around saying, 'Why aren't there more women?' and you do everything you can to persuade women to come on, but you still get far more men. On Counterpoint I've really struggled to get any women at all. There's no way you can do anything to make the quizzes female-friendly, like trying to think of questions that only women would know. That would just be insulting. You can't positively discriminate."

"We need 48 contestants a series and our best ever ratio was one woman to four men. Our worst was one to 12," says Richard Edis, who has produced Radio 4's Brain of Britain for 27 years. "Curiously, the women tend to be either terrific or rubbish."

Perhaps it's the company that puts women off. Like the nerdy University Challenge contestant played by James McAvoy in the current film Starter for Ten, the train-spotting tendency comes out in force on quiz night. The archetypal quiz buff can recite the names and dates of every top ten record in the past three decades. A recent Groucho Club quiz set by a male national newspaper editor contained an entire round on motorway service stations.

"Our archetypal contestant does tend to be a male, white, 45-55 librarian, civil servant or local government officer," Edis agrees. Marcus Berkmann, author of The Prince of Wales (Highgate) Quiz Book, thinks all-male teams are for losers. "There are always more men than women, but that's not ideal. Any team without women is missing several tricks. The worst person to have on your team is the bullshitting male who is absolutely certain that Gordon Banks won European Footballer of the Year in 1969. Everything they say is crap, and you will lose. Women are better team players."

Yet could the female instinct for conciliation be a drawback in the quiz arena? When quiz night comes round, it's hard to swap the consensual jollity of the school gate for the unilateral assertiveness needed to overrule a parent who thinks ichthyophobia is a fear of going bald.

It is almost exclusively women who use the expression "it's only a game". Once, invited on to Radio 4's The Write Stuff, I was amazed to find the team captains, John Walsh and Sebastian Faulks, trembling like whippets in their determination to win. When my side lost, you'd have thought we were Arsenal going 5-0 down to Tottenham. And producers prefer to have competitors who seem to really care. "Men do appear much more competitive in the quiz setting," admits Dawn Ellis. "And that does make for a better game."

This male bias in quizzes is often apparent in the questions. "It's true," agrees Berkmann. "I think women would prefer it if we moved away from the really boring, geeky detail about sport or rock music towards questions that depend on lateral thinking, like 'What did Queen Victoria say when she caught one of her staff impersonating her?'"

Yet knowing what James Bond drove in You Only Live Twice is knowledge, while knowing what Britney Spears drove with on her lap is trivia. "Oh, we don't have any truck with popular culture or soaps," says Edis revealingly. Like the pupils in Alan Bennett's History Boys, who are taught that a few idiosyncratic facts will beat a thorough education when it comes to Oxbridge entrance exams, quiz nights reward a certain kind of knowledge.

Ultimately, perhaps, the problem women have with quizzes is not so much gynaecological as epistemological. Now spell that.

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