Men are left-brained dominant, which on average gives us superior (albeit only slightly) visio-spatial awareness, logic and puzzle-solving skills. This is only an average of course, and may only be a contributing factor as opposed to a definitive reason, but it's the only explanation I've ever been able to come up with.
P.s. To be precise men aren't left-brained dominant, men use both sides of their brain equally wheras women use the right more and the left less
Why is it that at the top level, female chess players are, as a whole, nowhere near the level of the top male chess players?
I mean, you have Polgar who is still in a league of her own when it comes to female players. She can challenge any male Super GM and give them Hell, but after that, there are hardly any women that rate above 2600. I'm assuming that it must mean that women play chess in smaller numbers than do men--that fewer women decide to pusue chess professionally, and that the numbers reflect that.
Still, in this day and age, I would have expected the rating gap between the top female and male players to have noticeably diminished, much in the same way that women are now outnumbering men in earning doctorate degrees.
I remember reading a study once that demonstrated that video games activated the reward regions of male brains more than female brains, and offered this as a reason for the much larger number of male gamers than female gamers. I was thinking there might be some sort of parallel for the two sexes when it came to playing chess. Even in this case, though, the gap between the percentage of men who play video games and women who play video games is steadily closing.
Or was Bobby Fischer right: that women are naturally inferior at chess than men?
What do you think, chess.com?