I believe that you are massively over-estimating the value of detailed sports knowledge for this question. If someone claimed that they knew nothing, I'd give something like the following hint. The main things that you need to know is that there are teams, with players, who play games with each other. During the games the players do things we want to track. And each game belongs to a season. When you need to know more than that, we'll tell you more.
Was it gender biased? I don't think so. I never saw that detailed sports knowledge was a significant advantage. Furthermore in my time interviewing at that company, we had a total of 2 women in that interview. Neither had trouble on understanding the problem domain sufficiently well for modeling purposes. We hired one of them. We were on the fence about the other and decided not to. That was better than the average for men who reached that stage of the interview process. However the sample size is sufficiently small that it is not really evidence of a difference.
So both on first principles, and from the limited direct data that I have, the question does not appear to be gender biased.
Obviously, a lot rests on the interviewer, in this particular case and any other. But I'd say that there's a definite risk that some interviewers would subconsciously consider a candidate less intelligent after having to give them an explanation like in your hint, of facts they themselves consider absurdly basic.
Was it gender biased? I don't think so. I never saw that detailed sports knowledge was a significant advantage. Furthermore in my time interviewing at that company, we had a total of 2 women in that interview. Neither had trouble on understanding the problem domain sufficiently well for modeling purposes. We hired one of them. We were on the fence about the other and decided not to. That was better than the average for men who reached that stage of the interview process. However the sample size is sufficiently small that it is not really evidence of a difference.
So both on first principles, and from the limited direct data that I have, the question does not appear to be gender biased.