Girls vs. Boys Plot

Boys and Girls, in the ultimate battle for control of the page image.

Alright, it's a race to the bottom of the page. Let's see who's faster: Boys in one team, Girls in the other. First team to get there wins the title of "Best Gender" for all eternity. On your marks, get set, go!

Yes, it seems the men and women of fiction are always fighting. They're from two different planets, and all that, and with their differences always comes a lot of tension... often romantic tension, but still, tension nonetheless. And, of course, nobody wants to admit that the other "side" might just be better than they are. So how better to settle it than a proper competition?

One way or another, it always seems to happen. They'll split into teams and fight, often for no greater prize than to prove their own gender's superiority. It can be sports, it can be dancing, it can even be an all-out war— the basic plot is usually the same.

Most often, there'll be some division between them, even before the battle begins. It may be the men treating the women as weak, it may be the women trying to prove they're just as good as the men are, it may even be that both groups saw the other as inferior. That said, it isn't always the result of sexism but can sometimes just be a fun game between friends. Regardless of why it happens, the plot continues, with the lines being drawn, and the rest of the story showing their conflict unfold.

The episode tends to end in one of two ways. One is for the narrative to side with the girls and have them beat the boys, with the latter swallowing their pride and taking their loss in stride, and learning An Aesop about feminism or gender equality in general. The frequency of this outcome is likely due to some form of bias in the girls' favor, such as the assertion that Women Are Wiser. Another common outcome is for the contest to end in a tie, deliberately leave the conclusion ambiguous, or end without any clear winner or loser, with the Aesop being that neither gender is better than the other. If this happens, expect at least one person on both sides to call the tie unfair and call for a rematch, which probably won't happen.

More rarely, the episode may instead end with the boys explicitly prevailing over the girls instead. This conclusion is much riskier to end the episode with than the other two, as it can potentially carry the Unfortunate Implications that boys should feel justified in seeing the opposite sex as inferior, even with the justification that the boys team just happened to be better prepared for the contest in question. Strangely, this is not the case for girls winning over boys, but this is likely attributed to societal sympathy towards women (who were historically oppressed).

The topic of Transgender characters is almost never brought up during these episodes, and where a character who was assigned male at birth but identifies as female and visa versa stands in such a conflict. If it does get brought up, especially if one side is being particularly nasty to the character in question for trying to join them, expect the Aesop to be more about acceptance to those of non-traditional genders rather than the usual boy VS girl spiel.

Compare Showing Up Chauvinists and You Go, Girl!, both of which overlap. See also Slobs vs. Snobs and Brains Versus Brawn, which are often grafted on top of the gender divide (men are typically depicted as the slobs and the brawn, women as the snobs and the brains). If this happens within a friend group, may lead to a Friendship-Straining Competition. May also involve a Macho Disaster Expedition or a Gender-Separated Ensemble Episode. Finally, see also Girls Have Cooties.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The fourth episode of Boruto features all the boys and girls in Shino's class facing off against each other after Boruto and Sarada get into a fight over lunch.
• Kodocha: This was the main conflict in Sana's class in the first four episodes. The boys are troublemakers who create chaos in the classroom and disrespect the teachers, while the girls are irritated by their behavior but can't do anything to stop them… except for Sana, who openly confronts Akito, the leader of the boys. When they get into conflict, all the girls root for Sana and all the boys root for Akito. Episode 33 revives this plotline and mixes it with a Feud Episode, in which the girls are now openly fighting back against the boys this time (since the now reformed Akito isn't even bothering to join in), and two of the teachers (who also happen to be lovers) are the ones fueling it.
• Pokémon the Series: Ruby and Sapphire: "The Bicker the Better" does this, with Ash and James engaging in a double battle with May and Jessie after both groups (Ash's friends and Team Rocket) get into arguments over who is more competent. It ends with Jessie deciding to cheat by using an extra Pokémon, which Brock says disqualifies the girls' team, but by then Team Rocket are only interested in stealing Pikachu, anyway.
• The 1998 anime series Princess Nine is the story of a group of girls who want to play high-school baseball, but as there is no girls' baseball in Japan, they must play baseball in the boys' league, against exclusively male teams. The "battle of the genders" trope also extends to a more systemic level, as the girls' team must contend with discrimination based on gender — in fact, were it not for some interested parties in high places, their team would never have gotten off the ground at all.

Comic Books

• Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons: While the genders war was always present in the franchise ever since the original series (where Aphrodite's all-female clan opposed Mars' manly armies), this comic decided to up the trope a bit: now the creation of the Amazons is the result of a gender-based conflict opposing the Olympian goddesses tired of seeing women suffer on Earth, and the Olympian gods who refuse to do anything about it while affirming their authority and superiority over their female counterparts.

Fanfic

• One chapter of the fanfic Meeting Grojband centers around the titular band getting into a fight with the Newmans and accidentally awakening two gods of Rocklympus as a result: Masculeseus, the god of boy bands, and his sister Feminina, the goddess of girl groups. The two gods, unable to agree which band should be honored for waking them up as they're both co-ed, have them do a girls vs. boys battle of the bands instead. However, both bands refuse (partly because they don't want to be forced to split up, partly because they hate each other too much to consider working with each other), so Masculeseus brainwashes the boys into hating the girls in order to force it to happen anyways.
• An episode of Time Fixers: Nicktoons of the Future has a Camping Episode turn into a battle of the sexes after getting into an argument over who can survive in the wilderness the longest.

Films — Animation

• Frozen II: Early in the movie, Anna, Elsa, Olaf and Kristofer are having a miming contest, with the boys' team handily winning due to how easy it is for Olaf to take on different shapes (successively doing a unicorn, ice cream cone, castle, Oaken, teapot, mouse, and Elsa). Anna looks disgruntled and says Olaf shouldn't be allowed to rearrange himself.
• In The Chipmunk Adventure, The Chipmunks and their Distaff Counterpart trio have a competition to see whether the boys or the girls can win a race around the world first. Both get repeatedly sidetracked and nearly die, and in the end, neither team wins, as they abandon the race when they find out the whole thing is a front for a diamond smuggling operation.
• Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown has elements of this in the competition between the girls' and boys' rafts, though the true enemy is the bullies, and neither the girls nor the boys win in the end.
• In Turning Red, for gym class, Mei and her classmates play a boys vs. girls game of dodgeball.

Films — Live Action

• Bibi and Tina: Boys vs Girls unsurprisingly features this as the plot. Boys and girls are pitted against each other in a geo-caching contest, but the contest is ultimately interrupted by a wildfire.
• Shiverstone Castle has two pre-teen, sex-segregated boarding schools of opposite genders going at each other's throats. They eventually become all friends, with even a bit of Ship Tease between two pairs.

Literature

• The Berenstain Bears: In the Big Chapter Book and the Female Fullback, the B-plot involves Brother Bear running against Queenie McBear for school president. Queenie decides to turn the whole thing into a boys vs. girls fight by using the upheaval from Bertha Broom trying out for the boys football team in her campaign, expecting to win because all the girls (and one boy, her on-again off-again boyfriend Too-Tall) will vote for her as a result, while all the other boys vote for Brother (which would have made Queenie the winner by one vote). It doesn't quite work out like she planned, ending in a tie when one of the girls — Bertha Broom, the titular female fullback — doesn't care about women's issues and votes for Brother instead. Queenie still wins, but only because Brother concedes after admitting he has too many responsibilities anyway.
• Regarding the Trees has this as its central plot: a town feud breaks out over whether Angel Fisch's cafe or Chef Angelo's caffe is better and it ends up being divided by gender (the women support Angel, the men support Angelo).

Live-Action TV

• Blake's 7 got into the act with the controversial Ben Steed episode "Power", in which a post-apocalyptic society is at war on gender lines.
• The Big Bang Theory: In "The Re-entry Minimalization", Sheldon and Leonard arrange a Pictionary game night for themselves and their girlfriends. Penny casually suggests that the teams be boys versus girls, prompting Insufferable Genius Sheldon to claim that any team without him on it is bound to lose. Unsurprisingly, he ends up eating crow, as Amy and Penny prove far better at Pictionary thanks to Sheldon's Complexity Addiction: the first word given is "present," and while Penny simply draws a box with a bow, Sheldon insists on depicting the current situation that they're all experiencing—that is, the present moment. The night quickly devolves into a series of games that the boys keep losing, including wrestling (Penny pins Sheldon in seconds), a pie-eating contest, tracking down Waldo after removing glasses, and even deliberately making themselves dizzy and then solving a long division problem.
• Big Time Rush has had a few of these, which generally end with the boys and girls coming together and teaming up.
  • In "Big Time Pranks," the boys refuse to let Katie participate in their annual prank war, with Kendall asserting that girls shouldn't take part because they might get hurt. Determined to prove that they can handle it, Katie and several other girls challenge the boys. The girls get off to a strong start, eliminating the boys faster that they can retaliate, but then Kendall pranks most of the remaining girls. In the end, Bitters attempts to shut down the entire contest and proclaim that he wins and they all lose. Kendall and Katie, the last two remaining, choose to team up against Bitters and share the prank champion crown. From then on, anyone is allowed to take part in the Day of Pranks. In fact, in "Big Time Pranks II," it is actually Katie who declares that the last person standing in the new prank war would be crowned its King, and Kendall who adds, "or the Queen."
  • In "Big Time Girl Group," the boys become jealous of Kat's Crew, a new girl group Gustavo intends to produce, because the girls are given a poster (which the boys don't have) and get to sing the boys' new song. The boys try to make the girls look bad, which leads to Gustavo deciding not to produce Kat's Crew because he doesn't want to deal with another rivalry between bands. Realizing they were wrong, Big Time Rush urges Gustavo to keep Kat's Crew on, and the two groups create a music video together.
  • In "Big Time Camping," Gustavo refuses to let the boys camp in the wilderness, fearing they will get hurt. The girls convince the boys to join them in sneaking onto a Hollywood sound stage set up to look like a forest, despite the boys not wanting girls on their camping trip. In the ensuing "best camper" competition, the girls thrive while the boys are freezing, starving, and miserable, mainly because the boys keep trying ideas that would only work if they were really in the wilderness, e.g. lighting a campfire, only to be drenched by the overhead sprinklers. The girls invite the boys to join their campsite, but the boys refuse to give in and instead search the studio lot for food and warm clothing. Eventually, the two groups set aside their differences and team up, when the blond Jennifer is caught by a security guard and Carlos and James must rescue her, and Logan, in a bear suit, is mistaken for a stuntman and attacked by ninjas, and everybody fights the ninjas to save him. The episode ends with the boys and girls all waking up at the end of their camping trip together.
• Friends:
  • In "The One With Poker" the girls discover that the guys have regular friendly poker games and want in. The guys are reluctant, worrying they won't be able to keep up. Offended, the girls challenge them to a serious game for money... and lose miserably as none of them have ever played poker before. Later having taken lessons from a female professional poker player, they challenge the guys to rematch hoping to win back their money and still lose as a few lessons aren't enough to beat people who've been playing for years.
  • In "The One With The Football", the cast decides to play some Thanksgiving football. While the teams are originally mixed, Monica eventually trades Joey for Rachel, and it becomes a battle of the genders— complete with the girls using their femininity to distract the boys. The episode ends with the rest of them getting bored and quitting, leaving Ross and Monica fighting over the ball.
  • In "The One With The Embryos", Rachel and Monica play against Chandler and Joey in a game of trivia about each other. If the girls win, the boys get rid of the chick and the duck, but if the boys win, they get the girls' apartment. Since the girls failed to answer the question about Chandler's job, the boys win and the episode ends with the apartment switch.
  • A few episodes later, there's "The One with All the Haste", a continuation of "The One With The Embryos". Monica and Rachel try to win their apartment back, trying to bribe Chandler and Joey with Knicks tickets (the guys refuse) and then betting the apartment and the tickets once more with another game, but the guys win again. After the guys return from the basketball game, they discover the girls have switched the apartments round while they were away. Chandler is initially angry at the girls for stealing the apartment after losing the bet, but the girls have another proposal: they offer to kiss each other for one minute, if they can have the apartment back. The guys happily accept the deal and, after seeing the girls kissing, they say "totally worth it".
• Glee: Once a Season the Glee club is divided between girls and boys, with the groups then having to perform a musical medley. This is supposed to be a friendly competition, but often the groups take it too seriously. For instance, in the first season, both groups take drugs in order to keep their energy up. Kurt often ends up on the girls' team unless Mr. Schue puts his foot down and tells him to work with the boys.
• Grange Hill: In S4E18, tensions between the sexes come to a head. A boys vs girls contest is planned, with various sporting, practical and academic competitions. Boys just win the quiz (with a suspicion of cheating), but are thrashed at netball, also not without some cheating. Meanwhile, the cake baking of Mr. Sutcliffe leaves a lot to be desired, as does Miss Mooney's metalwork. Their respective assistants though have bought ready-made versions as a backup. Mrs. McClusky declares the contest a draw!
• Hell's Kitchen splits the teams between men (blue) and women (red), though competitors can be switched from one team to the other and the whole battle of the sexes is abandoned when the teams merge into the Black Jackets.
  • Sometimes this isn't adhered to - season 1 had mixed-gender teams, season 18 had newcomers versus returning contestants, and season 21 had 20-somethings versus 40-somethings. The latter two abandoned their new team compositions and returned to the men versus women format after multiple dreadful performances.
• The Island With Bear Grylls is a 2015 British television series that planted fourteen men on one tropical Pacific island, and fourteen women on another. Though neither group fared well, the women's group had two members med-evac'd during the first week: one fainted from dehydration, and the other was inconsolable for wrinkly fingers. Both groups fragmented into factions over leadership and survival duties.
• In one episode of the CBBC comedy Kevin's Cousins, the girls and boys have a basketball match. It's won by the girls, thanks to the substitution of Milo's Annoying Younger Sibling Brian onto their team when one of them is injured.
• Mako Mermaids: An H₂O Adventure: A millennia before the show began, a large pod of merman formed and tried conquering the seas and forcing all the mermaids to submit to them. Thanks to one of the mermen betraying the rest, the mermaids won the war and all mermen were banished to land, where they became functionally extinct. Zac and Erik are the first mermen that the Mako Pod had seen in centuries, and both of them were treated as swimming time bombs waiting to happen by the mermaids.
• On the MythBusters: it was episode 183. The team tested several claims about one gender being "better" at something than another. They also alluded to this during "No Pain, No Gain", when they looked at which gender has better pain tolerance.
• Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide: In "Guide to School Car Wash", the seventh graders decide to split their car wash into two gendered teams, both competing for a monetary prize to use for their school thought for different reasons (The Girls want gym equipment, the boys just want a Jacuzzi). The girls work together like clockwork once Moze convinces them they need to beat the boys, while the boys spend most of their time struggling, slacking off and failing to clean Mr. Sweeney's dirt-coated car. There's a bit of Hope Spot for them when Ned manages to rally them at the last hour and they seem to catch up to the girls in record time... except they didn't properly wash the cars in their haste, ^note You need to wet the car, suds it, wipe, rinse and dry instead just moving the dirt around. This ends up disqualifying them and giving the girls the win. Though Ned concedes their idea for the money was the more worthy of the two.
• Saved by the Bell had several episodes centered around this. For example, "The Will", where a deceased graduate leaves a $10,000 inheritance to Bayside, resulting in a contest to see whether the guys or the girls get the money.
• Victorious: In "Cell Block", after it becomes apparent that none of the students can handle being away from their cellphones, Sikowitz turns the competition into a gender battle, which gives the students a lot more interest in the bet. The boys start to play tricks to make the girls crack, but it doesn't work... until Sikowitz gives them their phones back. When the girls immediately use theirs, they lose the bet, as the boys didn't actually use their phones.
• Zoey 101:
  • The Pilot episode involves Zoey trying to prove that the girls belong at PCA just as much as the boys do, by having a Girls Vs Boys basketball game. The girls, however, suck at sports and get crushed. Even when the athletic Dana steps in to help, she and Zoey can only carry their team so far. They lose by a single point...but the coach offers them both spots on the male's basketball team in response.
  • The "Spring Break-Up" special involves the students starring in a special reality-show produced by Logan's father. The show, "Gender Defenders", is entirely about this sort of plot, meaning that they're put into this conflict intentionally. It starts out fun until Chase accidentally steals Zoey's Tek-Mate to delete a message declaring his love for her, which cost her team a game they would've otherwise have won due to a communication failure, and suddenly, it becomes a lot more serious, and the fighting becomes real. In the end, the girls win after a tie-breaker between Zoey and Chase that the latter forfeited just when he was about to win. It was then revealed the pilot was recorded by hidden cameras, thus everyone gets to star on the first episode.
  • The episode "Coffee Cart Ban" starts with the Dean banning coffee at the school after a coffee cart hits his wife. The boys then start an underground coffee shop, that overcharges the customers. The girls start their own business that charges less. The two then try to sabotage each other. Eventually, the competition is rendered moot when it's discovered that the Dean has been drinking coffee, despite his ban. Once this comes to light, he lifts the ban on coffee on campus.
  • The episode "Jet-X" has the team of the girls working against the team of the boys to produce a Jet-X commercial, to get a chance to have free Jet-X scooters. The boys seem to have better chances because they use Logan's money to have a glamorous commercial with famous actors, while the girls keep arguing because they don't know what to do, with Quinn trying to shoot their commercial. However, their arguments about the Jet-X turn out to be useful when Zoey does the editing to make her team's commercial, which ends up appreciated for being realistic, making the girls win.
  • In "Broadcast Views", Chase and Michael have their own broadcast where they are simply doing dumb stuff. But during a broadcast, Logan and Zoey start arguing in the background about gender preferences. This causes the broadcast to get more views and leads to their own segment "He Says, She Says", but also creates disruption among the students by gender lines.
  • During "Prank Week," the returning students play pranks on the new students - which, since this is the first year girls are allowed at PCA, amounts to the boys playing pranks on the girls. Although the new students traditionally aren't supposed to retaliate, the girls do so anyway after getting drenched with water balloons. The prank war grinds to a halt, however, when the girls get caught defacing a statue of the founder and threatened with expulsion. In the end, the boys deliberately play another prank and openly take responsibility for it, forcing the school to either expel all of the students (which is obviously impossible) or let the girls stay.
• Survivor season 6, The Amazon, started with this premise, initially splitting the tribes along gender lines, fostering this sentiment until tribe-mixing took place.
• "The Screwfly Solution," an episode of Masters of Horror, uses this trope to terrifying effect. One day, men all over the world find themselves slowly succumbing to a Hate Plague that causes them to become insanely violent and murderous toward every woman they find—up to and including their own wives, mothers, and small children. After the initial purges, the episode plays out like a dark version of this type of plot: the few women who avoid the first wave of attacks band together and do their best to survive, only to be slowly hunted down by the still-crazed men, who do gruesome things like mutilate their victims' bodies and turn them into trophies (at one point, a man proudly walks around carrying a bag made from a woman's breast). The episode ends with one of the last women on Earth discovering that the plague was caused by aliens, who arranged a Gendercide to make the planet easier to conquer.
• One first-season episode of Gilligan's Island sees Mary Ann and Ginger go "on strike"—that is, no longer doing the cooking, cleaning, and other chores for the castaways—until the men follow through on a promise to build them their own hut. Mrs. Howell joins their cause when she points out that Thurston hasn't yet fulfilled his own vow to construct a separate hut for themselves. The men are surprisingly nasty about the idea, prompting the women to strike out on their own. The rest of the episode sees Mrs. Howell, Ginger, and Mary Ann trying to live on their own while Gilligan, the Skipper, Thurston, and the Professor struggle to get along without them. The girls prove more capable than the guys, who resort to trying to scare them back rather than apologize or admit their mistakes.
• This was a very popular trope on I Love Lucy. The first few minutes of several episodes set up a conflict between Lucy and Ricky based on some stereotype (men being slobs, women being unable to manage money, etc.), with Fred and Ethel getting dragged into the scheme along gender lines as well. The two groups would then compete to prove their individual points, often resorting to increasingly convoluted gambits against each other to win. Unlike many other versions of the trope, the women didn't always come out on top—Ricky and Fred were just as likely to come out ahead in the conflict of the week as Lucy and Ethel were. A few famous examples:
  • The best-known episode that uses this trope is probably "Job Switching." Ricky and Fred claim that having a career and earning money is the hardest work imaginable, and Lucy and Ethel counter that running a household is no small feat either. The two groups agree to trade jobs for the day, with the men trying to keep house and cook and the women getting jobs in a chocolate factory. When disaster strikes on both ends, they realize that neither group has it easier than the other.
  • In "Equal Rights," Lucy and Ethel demand equal rights regarding money and household affairs. Their request works too well when the quartet goes out to dinner—Ricky and Fred ask for separate checks, and since their wives don't have any money, they end up having to Work Off the Debt by washing dishes in the kitchen. They later get back at the men by claiming that robbers are holding up the restaurant, prompting them to run down and "save" them.
  • One of the first episodes, "The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub," centers on this. The group can't decide how to spend Fred and Ethel's wedding anniversary: the men suggest a trip to the boxing ring for the prizefights, while the women would rather go dancing at the Tropicana. After both groups claims that they'll go to their preferred event with some new dates, Lucy calls up a friend of hers who knows every bachelor in town. When Ricky calls the same woman, she sides with the girls and fills them in on the plot. Lucy then hatches a Zany Scheme: she and Ethel disguise themselves as hillbillies and pretend to be the "bachelorettes" that Ricky wanted. But when Lucy gives herself away, Ricky and Fred see through the disguises and turn the tables, and the episode ends up with the quartet going to the prizefights after all.
• A few episodes of The Cosby Show used this trope in later seasons, as son Theo was the only boy among five children in the first few. Once the cast balanced itself out with the addition of boyfriends and husbands for the women, it became a more common plot.
  • In one episode, Cliff and the other male doctors in his hospital agree to a basketball game against the female staff. The men are overly cocky about their abilities, but end up humiliated when the women (who admittedly seem younger and more athletic in general) wipe the floor with them.
  • Another episode sees Cliff hosting a barbecue, where the subject of a bachelor party — and the stripper the organizers plan to hire — leads the men and women to talk about this trope at length. Sondra, Denise, and Clair claim that such events are degrading and objectifying, while Elvin, Martin, and Cliff argue that men are subjected to the Female Gaze as well, yet is treated as somehow more acceptable than the Male Gaze.
  • One episode has Cliff and a friend of his entering a "battle of the sexes" bridge tournament and using overly convoluted code signals and clues to pass information to each other. Clair and the other man's wife prove far more capable both at cards and secretly communicating.
  • A late episode in the show sees Cliff, Elvin, and Martin arguing over which of them is the most romantic, prompting Cliff to organize a "King of Romance" contest: whichever man can get a meaningful, amorous present for the lowest price will be the winner. When Olivia overhears the plan, she reports back to Clair, Sondra, and Denise, who decide to counterattack with a scheme to act indifferent to whatever gifts their husbands offer (the women even lampshade the trope's prevalence when they tell Olivia that girls always stick together in situations like this). All three women end up failing to follow through, though, as the presents their husbands offer are genuinely thoughtful and romantic; Cliff wins the title by not only tracking down a wooden bracelet that Clair admired as a teenager, but setting up a Batman Gambit where it seems as though he remembered wrong and purchased her a barrette instead.
• When Jack claims that men have more self-control and willpower than women after Chrissy impulsively eats a pie that he prepared for a cooking exam in an early episode of Three's Company, Janet proposes a contest to test if Jack can resist women for longer than Chrissy can resist food.
• The Better Sex was a 1977 game show that pitted a team of six men trying to outguess answers to questions regarding each gender against six women. The objective is to eliminate each member of the other team.

Music

• In this music video by Evgeniya Otradnaya, everything is going to that... and then ends up with a kissing scene.

Web Videos

• The Epic Rap Battles of History episode "Adam vs Eve" is this trope in battle rap form, where half of the lyrics are actual Biblical references and the other half consists of insults based on gender stereotypes.
• Day 11 of fishtank.live featured a "battle royale" which began with the remaining six men and women dividing up into teams, hoping to take out the other before turning on themselves. The former group barricaded themselves on the lower floor, while the latter decided to wait their opponents out upstairs. While the men took out two of the women, they quickly turned on themselves afterward, ultimately handing Josie the win.
• When The Nostalgia Critic and The Nostalgia Chick did a crossover review of The Chipmunk Adventure the video escalated into the two of them having their own battle of the sexes in song.

Western Animation

• Arthur: The conflict in "Arthur's Birthday" is caused by Arthur's and Muffy's birthday parties being scheduled on the same day, causing the boys to side with Arthur and girls to side with Muffy. The two sides play a game of tug-of-war so intensely that the rope breaks straight down the middle. As Arthur summarizes, "I guess nobody wins."
• An episode of Chaotic involved Peyton (male) and Krystella (female) having a Chaotic match to settle the gender issue, with one side using only male creatures and the other side using only female creatures. The female creatures win, but it turns out that Peyton was the one using all female creatures and Krystella was the one using all male creatures, confusing everyone who was watching the match and rendering the outcome inconclusive.
• In The Chocolix episode "Goodventure Camp", Chocolyne and Chocomark convince Goodventure Camp's visitors to compete in their Chocogames with teams based on gender, and they spend the rest of the episode fighting to win the prize with the clues they're given. They realize neither team got all the clues at the end of the episode, causing them to realize the boys vs. girls thing is a bad thing and set aside their differences to put their clues together and find the prize.
• The Codename: Kids Next Door episode "Operation: F.U.T.U.R.E." centers around a girl named Margaret teaming up with her future self to eliminate all boys on Earth. This leads to a future where the last remaining boys, led by an old-aged Numbuh 4, fight against Margaret's army of girls. The boys soon gain assistance from Numbuh 3's granddaughter, Sally Sanban, who defected from Margaret's twisted utopia, to go back in time and stop her plan.
• Duckman has "Exile in Guyville", where Duckman and Bernice arguing on TV gets exponentially out of control and causes every man and woman in America to start arguing with each other, and separate with a big wall dividing them, men to the west and women to the east. The two sides eventually come back together because of the kids of both sides wanting to meet and start relationships with each other.
• Fairly Oddparents
  • In "Love Struck!", which provides the page image above, Timmy made a wish that segregated the sexes in their own societies with a wall between them. But when the opposite sexes feel absent of something, Timmy wished for the wall that segregated them to break... except because they were separated for so long that they went right to war with each other. It took assistance from Cupid, who was literally dying from no love, to make things right.
  • In "Squirrely Puffs", Timmy's boy scout group, the Squirrel Scouts, gets into a competition with the girl scouts, the Cream Puffs, when his father and mother get competitive as usual, with the bet that one of the teams has to reach the top of a mountain before the other. The Squirrel Scout seems to initially have trouble while the Cream Puffs look to have an easier time what with the wildlife helping them. However, things soon turn around when Timmy's dad manages to get some local squirrels to help them get further up the mountain while the Cream Puffs's animal friends become a bit too helpful, to the point of annoyance. When Timmy's mom finally snaps at them, the animals turn on the girls prompting Timmy to get his dad to call off the bet and save them.
• In the The Flintstones and Bewitched crossover, Fred and Barney challenge Wilma, Betty and their tag-along new friend Samantha to a bunch of camping activities expecting to win, but thanks to Samantha's magic the girls have it all easy and the boys get an extremely absurd Macho Disaster Expedition.
• Futurama: In "Neutopia", the characters end up stranded on a barren, hot, rocky planet, and bicker relentlessly about which gender was responsible for the crash. A local rock-alien notes that, due to the gender divide, there clearly must be a superior gender, and makes them compete for the title... with the losing team dying in the heat. They all struggle until it turns out that this was a test to try to teach them about cooperation. But because they failed, they simply get their genders removed, instead...
• The New Archies: After the kids watch a detective movie, the boys and the girls compete to see who can solve a crime that fastest. They all end up suspecting the wrong man.
• Phineas and Ferb: "Got Game?" starts with Buford angry over Isabella defeating him at foosball. In trying to prove that women are weaker, he sparks Phineas and Ferb's grand idea of the episode- a battle between the genders, playing a nonsensical game with strange rules. It's Buford and Baljeet against Candace and Isabella, and while it's neck-and-neck for a while, Isabella and Candace eventually win, thanks to the final game being foosball.
• Downplayed in Recess: One episode has Vince and Gretchen both running for class president, with all the boys (save Gus and Mikey) siding with the former and all the girls with the latter. Instead of this trope's usual themes, this is presented more like a parody of political parties: Vince and T.J. try to get another girl to run to divide Gretchen's base, Gus and Mikey are undecided voters, etc.
• A less direct example in the Sonic Boom episode "Into The Wilderness", where Sonic and Knuckles try to prove they are more fluent outdoors than Sticks and Amy, though not out of any perceived sexism but merely Sonic's boastfulness. Due to Sticks' Wild Child niches and Amy's better willingness to learn, in contrast to Sonic's arrogance paired with Knuckles' boneheadedness, the girls make it through easily, at one point even trying (and failing) to help the boys get through out of pity. It is notable as one of the very few episodes, or much any story in the Sonic franchise, where Sonic is left the clear and unnegated "loser" of the story, even if in a scenario much more mundane than usual.
• South Park: "Cartman's Silly Hate Crime 2000" is the rare example where the audience is supposed to side with the boys, as it's the girls who are acting like jerks and insist that they can win in a sledding contest. The boys ultimately win, and the bitchiest girl is eaten by a bear. Yay!
  • In the Sex Ed episode, Mrs. Choksondik Scare 'Em Straight approach leads to the girls being absolutely terrified that even being near the boys will result in them becoming pregnant or getting STDs. The boys then do their own incomplete research and discover that it's actually the girls who can give them diseases, which culminates into a parody of the battle from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior.
  • A large part of season 20 revolves around this: an internet Troll keeps harassing the girls online. They're convinced it's Cartman (though surprisingly, they're wrong) but blame all the boys for his supposed antics. Every girl breaks up with their boyfriends en masse, which leads to Butters starting his own version of the Men's Rights Movement. The plot is left largely unresolved since much of the season was built around the assumption that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 US presidential election, and peters out over subsequent seasons.
• In the Teen Titans Go! episode "Boys vs. Girls", Starfire and Raven beat Robin, Cyborg and Beast Boy in a contest 3-0, resulting in Cyborg and Beast Boy defeatedly assuming girls are better than boys at everything, ignoring the fact that two particular girls just happened to be more competent and have better powers than three particular boys.
• A Thousand and One... Americas: The nineteenth episode doesn't start like this, since Chris doesn't initially notice the matter in question, but he realizes that the two major tribes that lived in the southeast coast of South America (Tierra de Fuego, Argentina) were contrasted this way. The tribe Chris first meets (Yagan) is that where women swim and perform various duties like gathering and fishing, and men have a less active role. The tribe he meets later (Onas, also known in Real Life as the Selk'nam) is one where men perform all major activities while women are culturally oppressed via intimidation (several wolfdogs are put barking in front of them, and during a ceremony men dress with black-and-white robes and begin performing fearsome chants and screams in front of them); the latter tribe's local chief tells Chris that they do this because his men do not wish to be dominated by women like it happened with the first tribe's. A seemingly-strange detail is that younger boys are also grouped with these women, but this is likely meant to serve as a precursory period of fear that the boys have to overcome later as part of a coming of age.
• Total Drama does this on multiple occasions, even in the World Tour season.
  • In the "Brunch of Disgustingness", the remaining boys and girls must eat disgusting food in order to win. Because of Owen's appetite, he wins the weekend spa trip for the guys.
  • In "Are We There, Yeti?", Chef Hatchet pits the guys (Owen and Duncan) and the girls (Gwen and Heather) together. Because of Owen's eating habits, he cost him and Duncan the challenge when Gwen and Heather reach the pole first.
  • In the season two opener "Monster Cash", Chris splits the contestants up into boys vs. girls to find the key for the trailers. Owen's appetite help him win the challenge and the decision to pick which trailer the guys will be sleeping in. Hilariously, to the anguish of the other guys, Owen picked the ruined trailer for "more character". This was not long before the girls' trailer was also crushed.
  • In "Crouching Courtney, Hidden Owen", Chris pits the girls (Beth and Courtney) against the guys (Duncan and Harold) in the first part of the challenge. Owen had to sit out under Chris' orders. In the end, the guys advance in the final challenge, while the girls had to prepare a banquet for the winner, which was Harold.
  • After Team Victory was disbanded, as well as Izzy's removal from the game, the rest of the pre-merge episodes were girls (Team Amazon) vs. boys (Team Chris is Really, Really, Really, Really Hot). The girls won in London, Greece, and Area 51, while the boys won in Australia and Sweden. The teams merge after that point.
• Wunschpunsch: In one episode, the wizards cast a spell that pits all the men and women of Megalopolis against each other in a competition for control over the city. The key to breaking the spell is getting a man to help a woman instead.