i would expect the average rating of women tournament players to be higher than the average of male playerss.

but i would expect the top players to be male as males tend to be extremes due to testosterone.

to paraphrase camille paglia

' there is no female fischer for the same reason there is no female jack the ripper'

i do find it difficult to understand women's lack of interest in chess, e.g in my country 1800 elo would have got a girl int o the dresden olympiad women's team and there are obviously plenty of females here who could reach that. yet while scores of men would fight toplay in olympiad for my country we can only find 4 women  willing to get to 1800?

katar wrote on 12/29/08 at 20:35:31:


That must have distracted you from playing!  

There's also quite a good book, from women's perspectives, called Chess Bitch by Jennifer Shahade.  (I hope this title doesn't get auto-censored.)

NB:  When a book has a wide public readership, its title shouldn't be automatically censored.  The synonym for pregnant dog that actually appears in the title rhymes with Witch.  Or Which.  I can never remember.

I have found that in the United States, girls outnumber boys in school chess programs until the girls reach adolescence.  The smart girls quickly find out that boys don't like girls who are demonstrably brighter than they are.

Of course, there are exceptions.  Unfortunately, the social graces that male athletes (sorry chess players, but in the US, chess is not a sport) generally learn is in short supply in chess players.

JEH wrote on 12/20/08 at 09:50:32:


No actually, a very sound statistical point is being made here.  You would expect, for example, the best right-handed players to be better the best left-handed ones.

This doesn't say that for certain groups, there might not be group-specific effects; it only says that when you compare the best players from groups of different sizes, you have to take this into account.

Good point- indeed, I recall I was frowned upon in some circles for being a chessplayer (there was an image of chessplayers being swots for instance!).  But I do think it's less accepted for girls to play chess than it is for boys.

The simple answer to the question is: because not as many women play chess.  But the question "why?" is rather more complex.

Most differences between men and women are the product of both nurture and nature. The basic differences are down to genetics, then social conditioning accentuates these differences by encouraging (and, in some cases, pressuring) people to conform to gender roles that reflect these genetics, cutting out a lot of the deviance from said gender roles that would otherwise arise.

Men are, on average, more aggressive and competitive by nature due to the extra testosterone levels.  But, particularly during their school years (the time when many people take up chess) there is often peer pressure on lads to be "manly" and girls to be "girly", and to impress the opposite sex.  It isn't considered very "girly" to play chess, hence girls who play chess risk being socially rejected for failing to conform strongly enough  to their gender roles.   There's also the issue that, particularly in school years, people tend to prefer to follow the crowd.  If chess isn't the done thing for girls, girls don't do it partly because it isn't the done thing.

To quote an analogous case, in the 1960s driving cars was a thing done mainly by men, not many women drove cars, and not many women showed an interest.  No doubt the people of the 1960s will have put this down to genetics.  But into the 21st century, it has become socially acceptable, and normal, for women to drive cars.  The result?  A large narrowing of the difference between the sexes, and a strong suggestion that nature accounted for only a small percentage of the reason why not many women drove cars in the 1960s.

In conclusion, I think more women would play chess if it was considered normal for women to play chess, though due to genetics, probably still slightly fewer than the men.

I don't think woman have the same thrive to be the best as men.
It is more in the nature of a man to compete than a woman.
I do not think intelligence is the deciding factor, but stubbornness to practise again and again and again ... and of course "the will" to win.
I think these things are much greater in males.
But women should take that easy, they have far more advantages in other fields like communication which is more important nowadays. And I mean after all what is all the stubbornness and will worth if you do not belong to the best of the  best ... .

TimS wrote on 12/19/08 at 10:12:28:

By a weird coincidence, the Royal Society is about to release a paper on this very subject. Here is a summary:

Why are (the best) Women so Good at Chess? Participation Rates and Gender Differences in Intellectual Domains   

The lack of women at the top level of intellectually demanding activities like science and chess is often attributed to their inferior cognitive abilities. We show in chess that although the best men are better than the best women, the difference is little more than would be expected given the much greater number of men who play. The simple but often overlooked statistical fact is that the best performers in a large group are likely to be better than the best performers in a smaller one. This may explain why women are underrepresented at the top of other activities where far fewer of them compete.