It"s a question that has fuelled many an argument: Whos smarter, men or women? Now, thanks to the admittedly unscientific experiment of a game of Trivial Pursuit, we have the answer.
And its 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 wasnt 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, whichwere sometimes just a few correct answers apart, but ended with thewomen clinching victory. They correctly answered 4,088,139 compared to4,077,596 by the men.
Welcoming the result, former Countdown maths expert Carol Vordermansaid: ;Its a magnificent result for women. The game is all aboutmulti-tasking and women are obviously the leaders in that field.
;The women always match the men on the tough subjects in TrivialPursuit, though I wouldnt go so far as to say it was a foregonevictory.
Unlike the board game, where the category of question is determinedby the roll of the die, players in the online game were able to selectthe 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 theEntertainment 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 twiceas 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 theystruggled with questions from the People & Places category,answering only 41.7 per cent correctly.
Men did best in Science & Nature, answering 57 per centcorrectly, and scored 56.7 per cent for Entertainment. Sports &Leisure, where they answered twice as many questions as the women, wasonly their third best subject.
Participants had been invited to take part atwww.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 experienceinvited everyone to show off their inner genius. Our congratulations tothe women.
Now Trivial Pursuit is planning a new experiment the Battle of theGenerations. It will pit the under 30 ;tech-savvy crowd against theover 30 ;life-savvy set in a new experiment from mid-March.
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