Why women are the winners in Trivial battle of the sexes



It's a question that has fuelled many an argument: Who’s smarter, men or women? Now, thanks to the admittedly unscientific experiment of a game of Trivial Pursuit, we have the answer.



And it’s bad news for the men, with the women nudging ahead to clinch victory. As the fairer sex celebrates and the chaps nurse their wounded pride, it should be pointed out that this wasn’t just any old round of Trivial Pursuit.







The makers of the game organised an online version that took place on a global scale, in nine languages, lasted for five months and saw some 15,121,731 questions asked and answered – although not all of them correctly. To clamp down on cheating, there was a 20-second time limit on answering the multiple choice questions.

The balance of power shifted repeatedly between the sexes, which were sometimes just a few correct answers apart, but ended with the women clinching victory. They correctly answered 4,088,139 compared to 4,077,596 by the men.



Welcoming the result, former Countdown maths expert Carol Vorderman said: ‘It’s a magnificent result for women. The game is all about multi-tasking and women are obviously the leaders in that field.



‘The women always match the men on the tough subjects in Trivial Pursuit, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was a foregone victory.’



Unlike the board game, where the category of question is determined by the roll of the die, players in the online game were able to select the subjects that appealed to their ‘inner genius’.

Battle of the sexes: After a five-month survey it appears women are the victors when it comes to the popular board game

In a sign of the times, the most questions were selected from the Entertainment category. The second most popular topic was Science & Nature, followed by Sports & Leisure and History. Arts & Literature, Geography and People & Places were least popular.

Entertainment was a piece of cake for the women, who answered twice as many of these questions as men and had a 56.8 per cent success rate. The second best category for women was Science & Nature, but they struggled with questions from the People & Places category, answering only 41.7 per cent correctly.



Men did best in Science & Nature, answering 57 per cent correctly, and scored 56.7 per cent for Entertainment. Sports & Leisure, where they answered twice as many questions as the women, was only their third best subject.

Participants had been invited to take part at www.trivialpursuitexperiment.com with questions available in English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish. Overall, Britain answered 954,000 questions.



Katreena Lines, of Trivial Pursuit, said: ‘The online experience invited everyone to show off their inner genius. Our congratulations to the women.’



Now Trivial Pursuit is planning a new experiment – the Battle of the Generations. It will pit the under 30 ‘tech-savvy’ crowd against the over 30 ‘life-savvy’ set in a new experiment from mid-March.



