"APPLAUSE" "Go-o-o-o-o-od evening. it's a battle of the sexes as QI looks at girls and boys and gender." "Let's hear it...for the girls!" "CHEERING" "Ronni Ancona." "CHEERING" "Sandi Toksvig." "CHEERING" "But what about a big hand for the boys." "MANLY CHEERING" "Jack Dee." "CHEERING" "Alan Davis." "CHEERING" "la difference." "Let's here our gender-specific buzzers." "Sandi goes..." "OPERATIC SINGING" "Ronni goes..." "HARP PLAYS" "Jack goes..." "WOLF WHISTLE" "And Alan goes... darlin'!" "AUDIENCE LAUGH you can pull me up short if you'd like." "HARP PLAYS that's an example." "You've started." "You get points for that." "you also might get a cuddle." "OPERATIC SINGING obviously." "All right." "round one." "Who was traditionally dressed in pink and called a girl?" "Was it Gok Wan?" "LAUGHTER not Gok Wan." "Is it Liberace?" "A person from history?" "traditionally a whole class of people." "A whole class of people?" "Are the lower classes always dressed in pink so you can spot them?" "I don't mean class in that sense." "A group of people who were dressed in pink and called a girl." "A girl as in a girl describing a group of people?" "No." "But babies." "Which babies would you dress in pink?" "Female babies." "Though boys used to be." "Boys were. the colours were pink for a baby boy and blue for a baby girl." "How could they be wrong for so long?" "Or maybe we took a wrong turn." "But I'll give you an example of Dressmaker Magazine from 1900." "The preferred colour to dress young boys is in pink." "Blue is reserved for girls as it is presumed paler and the more dainty of the two colours." "And pink is thought to be stronger." "there was a report about Princess Astrid of Belgium the colour for boys." "every shop has a whole pink corner devoted to girls?" "When did this happen?" "that's what I'm saying." "In 1927 they were still talking about pink for boys." "Was it really?" "Is it something to do with blue being considered quite serene and it's the colour of the Virgin Mary?" "pale and female colour." "But even more extraordinary is the word 'girl'." "Right up until mid-15th century..." "Boys were called girls?" "Yes." "They were?" "LAUGHTER aren't you?" "Yes." "This is the most extraordinary episode yet." "All children were called girls. girl children were called gay girls." "Yes." "So you have..." "I have no problem with that whatsoever." "Gay girls and knave girls." "The word boy was only lately applied to a male child." "it just meant 'servant'." "Boy!" meaning waiter or servant." "what the hell went wrong?" "isn't it?" "mobile phones..." "But is there anything to do with the fact that red used to be the colour for men?" "It was a strong Christian colour." "So I wonder if pink is like a sibling." "that pink was considered the colour of the Virgin Mary and so on." "I read somewhere that monkeys are attracted to pink." "The females are attracted to pink because the infant primates have little pink faces." "that's very good." "Did you read that or just see it on a children's television programme? will tend to have a pink-dressed baby facing them when they hug it and a blue-dressed baby facing outwards." "Thrown out the window." "Or just facing outwards." "and you're so unlikely to use it." "I think." "And they gave them dolls and trucks or engines to play with and the boy ones all wanted to play with the trucks and engines and the girl ones played with the dolls." "How weird's that?" "That is odd." "It is very strange." "I've got two daughters and a son." "There are going to be no guns whatsoever. and a toilet roll immediately became a machine gun." "It is the most... can you?" "No." "And he likes blue." "no." "Depends on the war." "Don't hold out for much hope." "do you know what the traje de luces is?" "The what?" "The traje de luces." "I thought you'd been unwell." "is it?" "No." "It's a thing a matador wears that is often pink." "the suit of light." "And the lining of his cape is pink." "AUDIENCE GROAN" "That's a painful moment." "Something's going to be pink in a minute." "LAUGHTER" "Tear me a new one." "AUDIENCE:" "OOOH!" "because it doesn't exist so it's an extra-spectral colour." "Aren't girls more inclined towards the red end of the spectrum?" "foraging." "having a little look on the savannah and boys running off towards the blue sky." "Is that not some reason why?" "I've heard something similar." "Foraging for lipsticks." "On trees in primal times." "Do you know that they've done studies of the hunter-gatherer societies and 9/10's of the food is provided by the women and 1/10 is provided by the men?" "we'll get some berries." "that bison was this close." "have your berry dinner." "so..." "It sort of counts." "We'll get him." "You got any berries?" "the truth is that pink used to be the colour for boys and boys used to be called girls anyway." "what's the best way to get a girl?" "'ALLO DARLIN'!" "Usually works." "LAUGHTER" "they're not interested." "There are lots of theories about it." "Is it something to do with diet?" "yes." "calories. 56 had boys." "So you don't want to have cream cakes just before?" "no." "women who ate at least one bowl of breakfast cereal a day were 87% more likely to have boys than those who ate no more which is quite... that's tosh!" "That's put out by Kellogg's." "What do they know?" "It does look rather extraordinary." "Ridiculous!" "Women who had boys ate about 400 calories more daily than those who had girls on average." "But those people who had Coco Pops had chimpanzees." "I don't..." "LAUGHTER" "A very bizarre one." "I do not know whom this would benefit commercially." "Women infected with hepatitis B virus are 1.5 times more likely to give birth to a male." "It's not a good reason to get it." "No." "We're certainly not encouraging it. is very popular." "000." "Wow." "A friend of ours had a baby in Thailand - an English couple. you have girl." "you will have boy." "What do you think I'm going to have?" "Boy." "That's outrageous!" "And she did." "boys and girls. and my son suddenly went "Hah!" "What?" "!" "There was probably a secret agent round the corner." "I don't know." "Is that puzzling?" "Ronni and I were talking about how wonderful boys are cos they live in this very clear world about themselves." "What's it like having two mummies?" "you've still got one to do for you." "LAUGHTER" "Excellent child!" "Excellent child." "I like." "aren't they?" "There are other theories." "Aristotle thought the diet of the mother and the sexual position used at conception made a difference." "with the diet." "Anaxagoras thought boys and girls come out of different testicles." "So you would tie off the testicle you didn't want the gender." "They're just making it up as they go along." "Based on nothing at all." "The Talmud suggests aligning the bed north-south before sex and then you get a boy." "you're right." "The French thought wearing boots to bed might help having a boy." "What have the boots got to do with it?" "I've no idea." "It does seem most strange." "Sex selection is a tricky business." "you may well ask?" "I know this." "after you." "Is it because women are just not funny?" "Ohh!" "that's right." "But we're good at other things." "We're good at raising kittens and knitting cakes." "I've heard this a lot." "I've heard that women aren't funny and I think there's a truth in this." "relationship between a sense of humour and the male sex organ." "you see!" "LAUGHTER" "Is this to do with the fact that people always say there aren't as many female comedians as there are men?" "Because you know what?" "There are loads of female comedians. because they're systematically rounded up and kept in a pen just outside Harwich." "Harwich." "But you can go and see them and adopt them online." "and you might get a joke back sometimes." "And then sometimes some of them escape and they disguise themselves as male comedians." "But you can always tell which ones are the male comedians" " the ones with the beards." "Just like Life Of Brian." "Bill Bailey." "Nearly a woman." "it's really rare to be allowed to sit next to a female comedian." "Are they worried that our cycles will suddenly synchronise or something?" "I'm in disguise." "I'm Rory Bremner." "WOLF WHISTLE" "Is it cos once you get them started they don't shut up?" "LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE" "Whoa." "What do we do about it?" "!" "I say! which is that women laugh more but they laugh less at women." "Women laugh more at men." "Audiences generally laugh more at men." "But women themselves do more laughing." "I don't know." "I suppose men are more willing to make prats of themselves." "truly great female comedians do make prats of themselves." "people like that." "And there's a strange division that girls have either got to be fey and look slightly stupid wear a pink jacket..." "Now stop it." "There's an interesting thing if you think about... for example." "Played ditzy and is one of the most successful Hollywood producers of all time." "very smart but played stupid." "they want to categorise you more." "Yes." "What is she doing here?" "man-hater thing?" "Is she doing the fey...? the subject was being a woman." "their subject was not being a man." "women were treating themselves as if they were they're 51% of the population." "Women don't have the history in comedy. we were all being tied to railway tracks while they were all being..." "Happy days." "LAUGHTER" "There are only two things and that's design dresses and cook." "Which is kind of an amusing thing." "almost all the great chefs are men Put them in the kitchen and make them design dresses. perversely." "Now we're off to China." "What does "Nushu" mean to Chinese women?" "nun shu is writing." "Is it something to do with writing?" "It is." "Nushu is a very particular kind of writing." "It's from Jiangyong County in Hunan province." "It was invented entirely by women for women." "Lady writing?" "It's lady writing." "Only ladies can understand it." "Women were not educated formally at all. unlike Chinese characters." "How To Poison Your Man." "they would be given a book by these secret female friendship groups and they would each write in the book and leave a lot of blank pages so that they could write their secret thoughts down." "only other women would." "really." "There's loads of words that women know like "sorry"." "I... "Fidelity"." "Ohh! "Responsibility"." ""Commitment"." "We have a secret language in this country." "yes. put it in a folder marked "instructions and he will never open it." "It's like a secret language." "APPLAUSE" "'ALLO DARLIN'!" "Sexist!" "points against." "because they couldn't take them for what reason?" "Horrible gruesome reason." "Because of their feet." "Their bound feet." "tell me about foot binding." "Were they called lotus flowers?" "When they were very young. and they would bend it right round underneath the foot..." "Three inches was the ideal." "They'd be like little..." "They'd become stumps like hooves. 000 years." "How ironic to come up with a writing system called "New Shoe"!" "It was a bit." "APPLAUSE messages to each other." "That's right." "The Bayeux Tapestry is actually not about the Battle of Hastings at all." "It's a complex soup recipe." "aren't there?" "In Africa..." "I'm trying to think whether it's the Bantu or the Zigua people." "When women go to..." "Stephen." "Yes." "The contingency is a remote one." "I would no longer be allowed to use any syllable that was in your name." "It's the language of respect that women have to use." "Wow." "say I wanted a stevedore over for a fry-up." "Hey!" "You couldn't say..." "Just to please you." "You'd have to say "edore" and "up"." "You couldn't say..." "I'd have to say a docker coming over for breakfast." "I couldn't use any of the syllables that are in your..." "Is that how Ronnie Barker got started? where you take the first syllable and put it at the end with an "ay" on the end." "I remember." "So "quite interesting" would be whitekay..." "Itequay interestingay." "exactly." "Esyay." "you scholar!" "LAUGHTER" "Plenty more where that came from." "LAUGHTER which I think is something like "spoon speak"." "And the French have Louchebem." "And there's Pileshki. which is their amusing nonsense language." "But those are nonsense languages where you apply a very simple rule and it sounds very quickly nonsense." "There's a very camp sort of High Church one where they call Holy Communion haggers commagers and that sort of thing." "Jessica Christ!" "LAUGHTER" "I have noticed." "Teenagers?" "Yeah." "You could say "uegh"." ""Oui"." "Would you like some more croissant?" "Ouegh." Uegh." "they can look everywhere else apart from at your face." "And then when they do eventually concede to look at you they go..." "LAUGHTER" "That's very true indeed." "what's going on here?" "Oh..." "WOLF WHISTLE half cock?" "yeah." "half cock." "Is it a freakish accident?" "It is a freakish accident." "Or done by design?" "it's not done by any kind of scientist." "It's a rare..." "I literally guessed that because of the theme of the programme." "for once." "I feel so foolish now." "It's called bilateral gynandromorphic hermaphroditism." "I was going to say that." "Yeah." "We are dealing with chromosomes again." "female." "Doesn't happen in humans." "wouldn't it?" "you could stand that way." "did you ever see the film Finding Nemo?" "Yes." "They're fierce." "I know a bit about them." "They have a relationship with that anemone." "That anemone is normally poisonous to other fish but they are immune to it and they have their babies in there." "they come at you." "They're quite fierce." "They are." "Do you know about their gender assignations?" "Is it variable?" "yes." "What happens is you have one female and one dominant male and the rest are all rather weakly and not very fit or sexually active males." "the active male then becomes female and one of the weakling males becomes the alpha male." "I like it." "It's sort of really weird." "Isn't that extraordinary?" "They are very unusual like that." "Rather splendid." "So the story of Finding Nemo and his father would have been very different." "His father would have been his mother by the time he'd got to him." "The whole thing would have been very odd. "Where've you been?"" ""Huh?" LAUGHTER" "Do you think these animals know that's what's going to happen to them or is it just instinct?" "Do they actually..." "Does he know? then I have to have it off with all the other blokes." "And I'm not into that." "what's happened to me?" ""I've changed." The change." "It is a very strange thought." "bilateral gynandromorphic hermaphrodites are male on one side and female on the other." "to break down the walls of mutual misunderstanding with a look at general ignorance." "if you please. with a saucy little poppet." "How can you be sure she's not a bloke?" "DARLIN'!" "it's a woman." "It's down there." "Do you want to buy a stamp?" "Trying to be helpful but asking you a question." "That's true." "on bar stools?" "There are things like that." "We were wondering whether you might say Adam's apple and we would have forfeited you because women do have Adam's apples." "You probably know you have an Adam's apple." "It's not as big." "But on some women it can be quite pronounced." "a lady person with quite an Adam's apple there. that the medical name for it and it's around the larynx." "So that's what you look at if you think someone's in drag?" "is the point." "a good lady boy can imitate almost anything female everything like that." "have large hands and large feet." "A dainty lady boy can easily fool and often has." "LAUGHTER" "As you know to your cost." "that one! you can't be sure what sex someone is so be careful out there." "Why are men better than women at reading maps?" "WOLF WHISTLE" "I would say." "They are not better." "Oddly enough." "I was so trying..." "Your one attempt to be decent backfired horribly." "spatial awareness." "Testosterone." "Isn't it?" "It's to do with the grey matter and white matter in the brain." "that in a test group of men and women with average IQ scores amongst the two genders roughly equal." "Don't be absurd!" "Hey!" "LAUGHTER" "How on earth are they finding... men use 6.5 times more grey matter than women." "Women used nine times as much white matter." "Grey matter is central to processing information and plays a vital role intellectual thought. the ability to do more than one thing at once. but it does seem that the evidence indicates that this is the case." "I'm so sorry." "Is it the white matter that makes you think it's OK to wind the window down and ask the way?" "which seems to be a female thing." "spatial cues." "don't you?" ""Do you know the way to Tesco?" "Uuuuhhhh... a mile before that turn left." "LAUGHTER" "I stopped an elderly man. "Do you know the way to Duncannon?" "Did you not want to go to Castlereagh?" "I want to go to Duncannon." "It's a pity because I know the way to Castlereagh." "LAUGHTER isn't it?" "Superb." "It does seem that men are better at spatial awareness problems and women are better at vocabulary problems." "one last fanfare to unfairness." "What is unfair about the prize money at Wimbledon?" "WOLF WHISTLE really good at tennis." "APPLAUSE" "Very damnably unfair." "Nothing." "Not any more." "CLAXON SOUNDS it's very unfair." "Is it still unfair?" "Women get more money for playing than men." "the ladies' champion won a 20 guinea silver flower basket." "Aah!" "While the men got a 30 guinea gold trophy. 000 more for Roger Federer who played 202 games." "The best women were earning more than the best men because their shorter matches allowed them to compete in both doubles tournaments as well as the singles." "The rate per game told the story." "432 per game against the men's £993." "How much do they win now if they win?" "It is equal for first prize." "The women's champion gets the same prize as the men's champion but the men's champion plays a lot more tennis." "the women have got to come off and make the tea as well." "oddly enough." "that's not that much when you think 15% will go to their agent then they've got to buy all their balls and they've got to buy that's very expensive." "So do the men." "They've also got to get a travel card to zone six." "They're left with about £1.50 after all that. it is arguably unfair to men who work harder and longer for less money over all." "Which brings us to the end of our hard work and the gleanings of our genders." "my goodness me." "Let's discover who's wearing the trousers here." "plus eight." "CHEERING AND APPLAUSE" "It breaks down as three for Ronni and five for Sandi." "I'm afraid have come last with minus five." "APPLAUSE Alan and me." "Hopefully the real winner tonight has been mutual understanding and respect." "I leave you with this thought from Canadian feminist Charlotte Whitton." "they must do it twice as well as men to be thought half as good." "that isn't difficult." Goodnight." "APPLAUSE" "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk"