Via Ray Hamel: women have taken the lead for the first time in an on-line Trivial Pursuit “battle of the sexes,” the U.K.’s Guardian reports.

Of course running a major story like this is destined to–boo!–make itself paradoxically untrue within minutes, in some “All Cretans are liars” way. An influx of newly-motivated men stormed the Hasbro site, and men have now widened to a 7,000-point lead again.

I wrote about gender differences in trivia back in Brainiac, and I still feel like my conclusion holds: women might know just as much trivia as men, but they’re much less likely to want to flaunt their knowledge in high-pressure public competitions, so you see a big “gender gap” in fora like quiz shows and academic quiz bowl. A Tuesday Trivia winner once told me that going on Jeopardy! has been a “lifelong dream” of hers, but the idea makes her so nervous that she literally feels faint when considering it. (Her current plan: get Mariah Carey @#$%ed up on her taping day.) Stage fright afflicts both genders, of course, but I get the sense that women are more prone to this special case, “trivia anxiety.” That could explain the more level playing field in an anonymous game like this one.

But the Hasbro website is a bit of a sham: it only counts the total number of correct answers, not any kind of “batting average.” It’s possible that women are answering 60% of their questions correctly, while men are showing up more often but only nailing 40%. Or vice versa. Actually, if we assume that the stereotypes hold and that men are slightly more interested than women in answer trivia questions on-line, then it’s very likely that women are out-answering the men…per capita, anyway.