Yes, there are differences in gender and psychological makeup but how much of that is cultural and how much is evolutionary? And how much do those differences impact how one plays the game of chess?
There is no right way to play chess and even male GMs play the games in different ways at times that play to their psychological makeups. Judit Polgar was in rated 8th in the world in 2005 and is still in the top 100 at 53rd. She had ample opportunity to excel in the game and was/is as strong as male players; she started at a young age, had the economic ability to allow her parents to provide training and access to tournaments. Susan and Sofia Polgar are also very strong players.
Ahh, I think I wasn't clear on this point. I wasn't saying that men are inherently better at chess due to psychological traits, I was saying that more men are more likely to work harder to become good chess players because the game is inherently more appealing to men (due to their psychology, the game was probably invented by men for men, think about it). If you extrapolate this to the rest of what I said about race I think you'll see what I meant.
I think you were plenty clear on your point. And I say that culture and opportunity play a much bigger part in what drives those psychological differences. Introduce the game to a female at a young enough age, give plenty of training and opportunity to excel and you can get someone that is just as good as a male. You always can run into the problem with pushing too hard and then losing interest, but you can get that with a male too.
The thing is, even if you do that in many Western cultures (maybe most) females are given a role and society (the implementation of culture) pushes those gender roles, even though this is becoming less pronounced. So in the case of female players, especially in the US, you have a large number playing at young ages and that falls off as they get older. Until you get to a point that there are fewer high level female players. Culture plays a very big role in this.
Don't you think it's more likely that the fact that men, in most cultures, are raised to be more competitive than woman are drawn to enage in competitive activities like chess? I think where we are getting our wires crossed is that these differences are mostly shown in studies to be due to cultural factors like gender norms rather than "inherent psychology". If you're going to throw around terms like inherent psychology in regards to race or sex you shoud be able to back that up. http://www.stanford.edu/~niederle/NV.AnnualReview.Print.pdf