Gender Equality for Game Show Contestants

[MSTieScott]

Correct me if I'm mistaken, because I'm basing this primarily on something I noticed while Buzzr's Saturday marathon was on my TV in the background last week, but did Classic Concentration make a point of bringing in a member of the opposite sex to face the champion?

[BrandonFG]

Could've sworn I saw an episode on Youtube where a woman won a car, then faced another woman in her subsequent game. I thought it was Marla the doctoral student, but it wasn't.

[Ian Wallis]

This is a very good question.   Nearly every show I thought of  I've had to really think if it was consistently man/men vs. Woman/women.  I want to say both the original CBS Password was as well as the original $10K Pyramid, but I may be confusing the men versus women CELEBRITY pairings and not necessarily the contestants.

The original $10,000 Pyramid had new contestants every half-game (rather than them staying on the whole day like they did on the '80s version).  In the episodes that have surfaced it seems that there were a fair number of men contestants, but there were still many games where two women played against each other, and they never had two men play against each other (this has been discussed previously on the forum).  The celebrity pairings were almost always a man and a woman, but on the rare occasions when they had two men celebrities they made sure all the contestants that week were women.  On the couple of occasions where both celebrities were women, they didn't reciprocate.

On the '80s version, every time there was a male contestant I always ended up rooting for them, because if they lost it would very likely be a week before we saw another one.

[Ian Wallis]

Card Sharks, not counting the Game Show Hosts tournament? Although I think I’ve seen at least one same gender match. I honestly can’t remember.

On most GT shows of the '70s and '80s, they had probably three-quarters women contestants.  Bert Convy even mentioned it briefly on a mid-80s episode of Super Password I saw once on GSN.  Card Sharks usually followed the same pattern, but was one of the rare GT shows where two men were pitted against each other a few times (on both versions).  It only ever happened once on Match Game '7x; about 4 times on Password Plus and never (as far as I know) on Super Password.

Two women playing each other on all of these shows was quite common.

[Big Brain]

Scrabble.

[jjman920]

This is a very good question.   Nearly every show I thought of  I've had to really think if it was consistently man/men vs. Woman/women.  I want to say both the original CBS Password was as well as the original $10K Pyramid, but I may be confusing the men versus women CELEBRITY pairings and not necessarily the contestants.

While it might've changed during the course of an episode, I'm pretty sure almost every regular episode of CBS Password started with male vs. female. The female celebrity would introduce her male partner and then the male celebrity would introduce his female partner and then the show. My memory recalls nothing different from that formula and I thought about it when I first read the OP.

[CeleTheRef]

In the Italian Who's Still Standing? by rule the central player must alternate between men and women when choosing an opponent to challenge.

[ActualRetailMike]

TPiR, at least in the early days, seemed to have way more woman contestants than men.

And don't forget The New Treasure Hunt, which, IIRC, was only female contestants.