Notes from the (Trivia) Underground

Rethinking the quizzing canon

In my previous blog, I documented my forays into the weird world of competitive quizzing. One anecdote in particular summarizes my experience as a woman in the trivia community:

After my failure on Millionaire, I immersed myself in my career. Five years later, hoping to rekindle my love of trivia, I joined a pub quiz meetup in New York. There, the leader tried to explain women’s breasts and the Japanese language (my college minor) to me. Then came a question about the periodic table: What chemical element takes its name from the Latin word stannum?

Having studied Latin for six years, I answered tin. He overruled me, claiming that “tin isn’t an element,” going with bronze instead. I did not return.

This is just one in a long line of similar stories. A high school quiz bowl colleague gave me an unsolicited back rub, while my coach called me a floozy. My ill-fated attempts at game show glory produced paltry paydays, but they did yield a treasure trove of unsettling DMs. Did you know there’s a Subreddit dedicated to discussing the “hotness” of female Jeopardy! contestants? I wish I didn’t (and I can’t say that I’m surprised).

As I’ve learned from other women in the community, my experience is far from unique. In a meticulously researched paper on sexuality and gender in quiz bowl, Chloe Emma White Levine documents gender disparity and systemic problems in quiz bowl. When she became the first female quiz bowler in years to compete in the NAQT High School National Championship Tournament, “things quickly turned ugly” after the match streamed online. “Many misogynistic and sexually explicit remarks flooded the site,” she writes. “While I was not the only one of my teammates targeted, I was the player targeted the most frequently, andI was the only one targeted for an immutable demographic characteristic rather than a specific action or behavior.” History repeated itself when Beavercreek High School became the first HSNCT winners ever with gender parity.

Gender disparity is painfully obvious not only in the demographics of quizzing but also in its canon. The vast body of “things worth knowing” is neither fixed nor neutral, shifting over time and across formats. A Jeopardy! contestant ought to recognize the 17th-century fishing manual The Compleat Angler, while an academic quizzer might study Albert Bandura’s Bobo doll experiment. Neither subject would help you win a pub quiz, where you would be better served by memorizing Super Bowl winners. Each venue has its own hierarchy of significance.

In academic quiz bowl, “You Gotta Know” lists published by the National Academic Quiz Tournaments (NAQT) provide a snapshot of the canon. These lists reveal imbalances that reinforce the broader gender disparities within the activity itself. Take the list of sculptors. Is Daniel Chester French more notable than Barbara Hepworth, Louise Bourgeois, Camille Claudel, or Louise Nevelson? Should we care more about him than non-white artists like Isamu Noguchi, Anish Kapoor, Augusta Savage, or Yayoi Kusama?

If you dive deeper, you will find that there are, apparently, no female architects, no female mathematicians, no female linguists, no female physicists, no female Jewish-American authors, no female sculptors, no female composers, and no female psychologists “you gotta know.” Of the nineteen notable 20th-century paintings and ten Irish books, none were created by women.

Some lists (Revolutionary War generals, twenty-first-century quarterbacks, popes) are exclusionary by nature. But when half the population is absent across disciplines and historical periods, it becomes a structural problem. It is no coincidence that of the 183 NAQT lists, just five were written by women.

The further I’ve journeyed into the world of quizzing, the more I’ve realized that trivia is far from trivial. The canon shapes which stories get amplified and which get erased. And by excluding these stories, we also exclude people who don’t see themselves reflected in the questions we choose to ask.

But the canon is mutable, and in The Trivia Underground, I hope to do my small part to expand it. I’ll be sharing newsletters and quizzes that highlight achievements of underrepresented groups and contributions from the Global South. That doesn’t mean I’ll ignore the canon entirely. Certain topics are, after all, canonical for a reason. “Mystery themes” are my favorite quizzes to write, and these quizzes will mix common knowledge with lesser-known topics.

Trivia—whether you’re doing it on television, over Zoom, or in a dive bar—should be fun. But it should also be bigger.

Welcome to the underground.