Even if Hari Parameswaran, captain of the 2018-2019 Beavercreek High School Quiz Bowl team, had not known who the prime minister of New Zealand was — Jacinda Ardern — he would have still led his sunglasses-clad trivia squad to a soaring victory at the High School National Championship Tournament in May. “We were expecting to do well, but none of us expected to … close it out,” Parameswaran, now a first-year at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told the HPR. As much as he achieved personally with the win, it was an even greater milestone for the community: Two of Beavercreek’s four players were women, making their team the first ever HSNCT winner with gender parity.
The community’s response to Beavercreek’s victory revealed elements of Quiz Bowl culture that might explain why this landmark accomplishment only happened this year. As current junior, Abby Cohen, Beavercreek’s second-highest scoring player, remembered, the tournament’s Instagram almost immediately bore comments delegitimizing her role in the victory because she answered fewer questions than Parameswaran. “They didn’t say a thing about our third scorer [out of four], who was a male, whom I outscored,” Cohen told the HPR. These comments are the most recent additions to a litany of attacks on elite female Quiz Bowl players. The last time a girl played for a national champion team, in 2017, comments on a Periscope live stream ridiculed both her appearance and her incorrect answers.
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Quiz Bowl has difficulty attracting and retaining female and nonbinary players. Many other high school academic competitions, from speech and debate to Model UN, suffer from similar gender-based inequity. When students of some gender identities do not feel comfortable participating or fully engaging in these competitions, those students lose access to their much-lauded pedagogical benefits — and the boost they provide to many college applications. As such, this imbalance is not just an inconvenience but an issue of educational access.
The Value of Academic Competitions
Even at schools with rigorous academic curricula, academic competitions stretch students in ways a classroom environment cannot. “I think it hits different parts of the brain,” commented Sarah Angelo, president of the Partnership for Academic Competition Excellence, in an interview with the HPR. On a basic level, competitors are afforded some degree of agency in determining their own course of extracurricular study; no one uninterested in law need join Mock Trial in order to earn a high school diploma, for example. Further, in Quiz Bowl specifically, specialization allows players to focus on whichever topics appeal to them most. “It makes learning fun, right?” added Parameswaran.
Beyond that element of choice, competitions also test for different skills than classroom environments, allowing students whose strengths are not always celebrated to shine. Model United Nations emphasizes strategic thinking. Debate emphasizes public speaking. Quiz Bowl emphasizes expansive, long-term memorization; it is impossible to cram for a tournament encompassing the entire academic canon the way students can cram for a unit exam. And all of them simply change the forum for intellectual engagement, which can prove liberating. “A lot of students struggle with the traditional talking out loud in a classroom full of people,” Megha Prasad, a first-year debater at American University and a co-founder of the Girls in Quiz Bowl Committee, remarked to the HPR. “Being able to speak in a smaller setting is helpful.”
Such activities also develop new skills in students. According to a Forbes article, the communication and research skills necessary for debate, not to mention the tenacity and pressure it develops, are “excellent predictors of success,” and thus good reason to hire former debaters. Mock Trial helped Davis Tyler-Dudley, a head delegate for the Harvard intercollegiate Model U.N. team, learn how to craft convincing arguments. “[That] has influenced how I talk to people, how I deal with people, how I negotiate with people even today in my life,” he explained to the HPR. The knowledge accrued through Quiz Bowl has the potential to broaden players’ perspectives. “I used to be a bit judgmental,” admitted Parameswaran, “but now I can sit down and talk with people … I can understand where they’re coming from.”
These skills are then instrumental in competitors’ approaches to the college admissions process. Tyler-Dudley noted his sales pitch to fellow high-schoolers for academic competitions: “It will make you a better candidate.” He is certainly a data point in that pitch’s favor; Mock Trial clearly helped him get into Harvard. “It made me a much more effective communicator in the interviews … I had become more skilled in the art of presenting yourself a certain way, convincing people of a certain point, and that point for me was ‘I should be admitted to this college,’” he reflected.
On a more statistical level, these competitions are widely acknowledged to be strong additions to an applicant’s extracurricular list in the eyes of admissions officers. Former Yale professor Minh A. Luong wrote in PBS that “college admissions directors are relying less on grade point averages and standardized test scores, and are relying more on success in academically related extracurricular activities” due to the “distorting” effects of grade inflation and standardized test prep. To whatever extent standardized test scores do still inform admissions, though, the argumentative skills associated especially with debate map neatly to the format of the new SAT, and on average, high school debaters perform better than their non-debater counterparts on each ACT section.
Luong also argues that admitting competitors makes financial sense, as conventional wisdom suggests that their acquired skills will fuel successful careers which enable substantial alumni donations. Due to the currency academic competitions thus hold with admissions offices, students need not waste precious application space outlining them in order to make their accomplishments understood, while success within a school-specific club might hold less water without significant explanation. All these factors conspire to make such competitions helpful in earning critical scholarships as well.
A dangerous result of these benefits, however, is that some students stay on teams they find unfulfilling or even threatening in order to gain admission to top colleges and universities. Luong’s article emphasizes the importance of high schoolers picking their activities young and sticking to them. Such advice from experts now permeates the public consciousness for college-minded students. “I was at a point my junior year where I wanted to quit both Quiz Bowl and debate,” Prasad confessed. “[Something] which I think a lot of girls in particular experience is you start an activity, and then it becomes really toxic for you, but you’re like, ‘Well, if I quit now, I’m kind of screwed for college.’”
Underrepresented Genders
Such activities remain male-dominated precisely because the few female competitors in them often feel trapped in them, yet many pieces of the puzzle are still unknown. Players, coaches, administrators, and observers alike generally accept underrepresentation of other gender identities as a truism, but though personal testimonies abound, academic research into the problem is shockingly scant.
As such, efforts to address inequities are often trial and error, informed by the personal experiences of their architects. For example, Cohen’s own frustration about most trivia’s focus on male achievements influenced her assertion that ATHENA, a Quiz Bowl tournament Prasad founded to focus on women’s accomplishments and interests, does important work to make the activity more welcoming. She remembered a list of notable authors she was given to study: “[Jhumpa] Lahiri was on it, Flannery O’Connor was on it, Anne Bradstreet was on it. And I just remember thinking, you know, ‘Is that it? Is that everybody?’”
Cohen hopes that broadening the canon will increase equity in Quiz Bowl and ease the pressure she feels as a nationally competitive player: “I feel like I have to do better than a male teammate would because … if I don’t, then I’m letting down my entire gender,” she explained. Such sentiments are hardly new. In a 2012 Slate article, former Quiz Bowl player Lauren O’Neal wrote, “When women mess up, it reflects badly on their entire gender.” This eerily similar language starkly illustrates just how little progress toward inclusivity Quiz Bowl has made, despite Beavercreek’s success.
Unique gender-based problems plague high school debate. Female and nonbinary students report — often anonymously, for fear of backlash — that the judges allow misogynistic slurs from their male opponents, factor their appearances into their scores, and apply a double standard. “Judges would critique you for being bitchy or argumentative when you were literally just doing the same thing as male debaters,” Prasad recalled. Unequally distributed attention from coaches and a lack of diversity among tournament judges only make matters worse.
Even as Model U.N. seems to maintain something closer to gender parity, students of marginalized genders still face challenges. As with debate, some competitors claim that judges take female delegates’ fashion and perceived attractiveness into account when scoring them. More subtly, gender affects which committees students join: more boys on International Security, more girls in Human Rights. Some female delegates also describe peers who take their arguments and stances less seriously than those of their male counterparts.
No competition seems devoid of inequity. Thus, in Prasad’s words, “female novice retention becomes hard.” She elaborated, “Okay, if I’m going to spend the resources to go to this tournament for a weekend, I’m not going to get that much sleep, I’m probably going to be depressed or anxious for most of it because of the atmosphere — it just makes it really discouraging to continue to compete.” The problem then becomes self-perpetuating: Students of underrepresented genders leave academic competitions because they do not find role models of their identity, so they never have the chance to become such role models. In Cohen’s eyes, representation is a necessary first step to further change. “The number one thing is we have to keep [girls] involved,” she insisted.
Potential Solutions
Making competitors of underrepresented genders more visible in competition communities helps break these old patterns. “We have a responsibility to open those channels of communication and help underrepresented players see themselves in older players and know that they can do this,” explained Angelo regarding her work with the Partnership for Academic Competition Excellence. To that end, PACE is developing a mentorship program which will pair younger female and nonbinary Quiz Bowl players with competition veterans. Prasad saw evidence for success in the recent example of PACE’s efforts to publicize the women behind ATHENA. “That also probably helped some girls out who may have been thinking of quitting but then were also like, ‘Oh, maybe there is a community of strong … women that I can stick around with,” she suggested.
Prasad also commended National Academic Quiz Tournaments and collegiate debate organizations for their appointment of equity officers to staff tournaments as resources for any players suffering from bias, discrimination, or harassment, and argued that such officers should be made more present for high school competitors. In her view, because younger players are more impressionable, they are more prone to internalizing the prejudice they experience. “I don’t understand why they haven’t done it,” she remarked. “Why did this start in college [debate] where people are more self-actualized, and not in high school when this discrimination actually hurts more?”
Ultimately, though, people cannot possibly know how best to address this inequity without adequate attention from researchers and administrators. Activists within high school academic competitions have made impressive accomplishments, but with more information to propel those efforts, gains might be less few and far between. “It really heartens me to see how far things have come, seeing things like [a] Women in Quiz Bowl panel that happened at [nationals] last year … I think back to my day, and I’m like, ‘Well if we’d have had that, who would have been on it?’” reflected Angelo. “But I think it’s important to remember … we can’t be satisfied with where we are. We have to keep going.”
Image Credit: Pixabay/Michal Jamro