My girlfriend just asked me why is there a womens chess champion? She thinks that it is a insulting tradition because in a game of logic both men and women are equals. I agree with her and I'm reaching out to the chess community to shed some light on this subject. I'm aware that there are many games featuring men Vs women GM's, but why are there seperate league classes? ex. women's world chess champion and men's champ?

Men and women clearly aren't equals, check out the rankings.

less women play than men so the talent pool is smaller. Plus, there's several games where a woman has defeated a higher rated GM of the opposite gender.

Well, if there was one title it would never have been won by a woman.

Clearly the women that compete for the womens title aren't offended or they wouldn't do so.

statistically women get higher grades than men in school and the majority of people in college are women. I think your perception is off.

Well JP competes well so difficult to generalise.

http://ratings.fide.com/top_files.phtml?id=700070

Judit Polgar is a great example of a female genius

accourding to this guy, never in the history of mankind could a woman ever be the best at chess. What do all the ladies out there think about this?

What problem do you have with it?

Women can compete in both and their participation in the Womens Chess World Championship shows that they aren't offended by the concept.

There should be a female title so that women have the same incentives to go professional until we reach a point where enough women are playing to put them in competition for the world championship title.

Currently, not enough women play to create enough strength at the very top(Polgar is brilliant but not even top 20) and it would be harmful to remove the possibility of women to even win the women's titles.

No, your reading comprehension needs work.

You're mixing tenses. Why are you using a conditional verb to talk about history? I'm saying they wouldn't have done in the past, not that they couldn't in the future. They are given the opportunity.

OK, thank you for that, now my girlfriend isn't as frustrated because you explained that very well.

It's a good thing chess is mathmatical and not grammatical.

Well of course (for-a-laugh) there is this thread :

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-buzz/why-is-there-a-womens-world-championship?lc=1#last_comment

@netzach 55 pages of comments came from an open-ended question, but from what I read that is pretty funny. I'll go back to that later after work.

@Shadowknight911 thanks for this video link.

I'm off for now, but thanks to everyone for helping us resolve this question.

And post #9 in that thread (by @Batgirl) lays out some of the issues in a thoughtful way.

Followed by 1000+ posts, many of which raise mayhem.  

I also think there should be no class seperation, men and women should play in the same tournaments and be going for the same trophy,  women are our equals in chess, we just need more of them.

Statistically speaking, there's no reason to suspect that women are inherently weaker than men in Chess. The far more interesitng question is why is that women drop out of chess at a rate far higher than male participants?

In scholastic chess circles, the number of female players is considerably higher than in adult chess competitions. And far more of them drop out than their male counterparts.

Granted, given that something like 95% of scholastic chess players do not continue anyway the question as to why scholastic players drop out might answer why their is so few female players continuing on. But it might not.

My suspicion is that it is largley cultural. In much of the world, women do not really have the choice to pursue a career, let alone a career doing something as frivolous as playing a game.

women are not as good as men as chess because mainly men can deeply and intensely focuse better than women but women multitask better than men so men can play better chess kasparov said that an unshakeable foucuse is key to good chess that and the fact that women are more emotionaly unstable ie they cry and laugh more easily which contributes more destractions and makes them focus less and women have lesser mathimatical spatial reasoning abillitys that shows part of the reason why women get better grades because there are aids such as paper and caculaters for math students nullifying mens adv but there is no such thing in english short of cheating

I find it hard to believe robotjazz's girlfriend really thinks that.