Why is there a Women's World Championship?

If you don,t see the point, try irony.

if you still don,t see, get a white stick.

How can you ask him to "take that back."  You just agreed with him.  When you say "Im pretty sure the best men grandmasters are better than the best chess grandmasters of women," you're repeating exactly what he said.

Um, because Alexandra Kosteniuk is really cute when she's dressed up as a Queen?

 I tend to agree i believe also it's largely due to a lack of numbers for woman in order to compete against men, even the best woman in the world wont win the world title in the men's division as good as she is. I think Judit is the only player in the top 100 players list that means she is competing against 99 men players who are equal and better then her on average. Its a shame really, woman when they get into chess are great players to watch for many reasons, as some others described already.

The difference is that people's brains aren't developed according to race, religion or sexual preference. On the other hand men's and women's brains are created differently and excel at different things.

there should be a mens only championship that women cannot win that would settle it.

it seems to me that there are valid arguments either way but my first reaction is that it is like admitting that the womans game is sub par buy having a womans championship.

 You're joking, aren't you. There have been thousands of Jewish masters. Emanual Lasker, for example, was a Jew or at least the son of a Jew. There have been probably more Jews as grandmasters per capita than any other religions.

I think that the disparity has a lot to do with the participation levels of women versus men in chess.  That being said, having a women's championship that is separate from the men's is a good thing, because it explicitly creates exposure of the game and the ability for women to excel at it to young women who might not otherwise choose to pursue it.  In the long run this should hopefully serve to push the proportion of female chess players up in order to work towards correcting the disparity.

If the women's championship did not exist, the current situation would very likely not be conducive to women making an appearance at the top level of play and the participation level disparity would become further entrenched.

I think there is a Women world championship because there is a demand for such tournament, at least a part of them do want to participate in  it.

If there was a demand for, say, gay-only world championship (as someone asked above), i'm sure that one could create such event.

When people say that men are better than women at chess, don't call them so sexist. They just see that the strongest men are much stronger than the strongest women, it does NOT mean that they think men are better or smarter than women. The reason why women can't compete with the top men is by far most likely because they aren't as obsessed about it. Yes, you can talk about all the exceptions for women who play it all the time, but they just aren't as much as the men. The super Gm's like Anand will spend all day just so they can increases their elo by 1 point, looking through tons of theory and probably going over every part of the game in detail. I think that if any women studied as much and efficiently as a top player like anand or kasparov, they should be just as good. They're smart enough of course to get great at chess but at the top level you have to put in tons of time just to go up at all. Some have more natural talent than others, but really anyone can reach the top level with enough study.

Fischer called Kasparov "Weinstein the Jew".  But then, he hated all Jews and called anyone he didn't like for any reason "a part of the Jew cospiracy".  The Soviet school, during the not so good old days, most assuredly worked the female players as hard.  But their performance never equalled the men (in specific games, yes, but not over the course).  If someone has actual evidence to support the idea that women don't study as long or work as hard as men I would be interested in seeing it (not just quotes of statements saying they don't).  A very low percentage of GrandMasters are women.  That is the what, which can be shown statistically.  The why is less clear.

 I would like to know if Fischer hated all jews why would he spend time in the home of the Polgars when he was in Hungary ? Does this mean he also hated his mother ?  You should be careful what you allow yourself to believe.

Yes there are, men can't play in the womens championships or tournaments :P

 What does that have to do with the original exchange?

Q. Exactly. Correct me if I am wrong, but a woman can compete in the overall World Championship, correct?

A. Sure, if she qualifies.  There are no gender restrictions.

The reason for this is, in my opinion, the fact that some countries segregate men from women. To avoid offending ANYONE, Women have a seperate Championship, and everyone's happy.

Women wouldn't come close to winning the world championship. An exception may be Judit Polgar if she still plays, but she's still quite a bit lower than the top men and the next highest female player right now is like 2550, right? They wouldn't want to play if they had no chance of winning. They're not exactly sexist, as facts are facts and they want them to have a chance. If they can become good enough, then they would go in the real world chess championship.

I don't have the data on hand, but I suspect that if you compared the ratio of women to men in the top 1000 players you'd see an extremely strong correlation to the ratio of women to men in the top 10000 players.

Comparing the top few seats simply isn't a large enough sample to be representative, so using the fact that there has never been a female world champion as evidence of some fundamental difference between men and women that manifests itself in their chess ability is misleading at best, and downright deceptive at worst.

Thats like asking why there are scholastic championships, blind chess championships, or each country having there own championship.