Men and women in chess

97% of GMs are male?

There are more men earning a GM title each year than there have been female GMs in all of history. This will of course change by itself, but what are chess organizers doing about this and what can and should be done?

In the FIDE top 100 players in classical chess, sorted by Elo rating, there is just 1 single woman and she is retired from full-time competitive chess, Hou Yifan. She is number 83 today, 16/12-21. The highest rated fully active female player is way outside the top 100.

https://ratings.fide.com/top_lists.phtml

FIDE and other organizations today have big prizes, tournaments, and titles for women only to get more women into chess. For example, GM is the highest title you can get in chess, yet the Woman Grandmaster title, WGM, is easier to acquire than even an IM title. This all gives women an overall much faster and easier way into making a living from chess. But this singular focus on preferential treatment to attract women into chess may be misguided as I will explain in this blog-post.

Hou Yifan has a great interview posted on chess.com. It presents some ideas about differences between genders than I will expand on. The article also states that only 3 women have ever made it into the top 100 in classical chess.

https://www.chess.com/article/view/hou-yifan-interview-chess

I excluded the questions and some of the smaller points she made:

I think there is a physical aspect because chess exhausts a lot of energy, especially when games last 6-7 hours, and here women could be more disadvantaged. But in general, I think women train less hard at chess compared to men while they’re growing up.

In China, girls tend to think more about university, and then things like family, life balance...while boys are more focused and persistent on that one thing. This makes a big difference. The ones who put greater effort in achieve better results. But I also think there are external factors too.

Growing up, female players are told, "If you win the girls’ title, we’ll be really proud of you, and this is a great job!" It’s unlikely that any of them were told, "No, you should be fighting for the overall title!" Girls are told at an early age that there’s a kind of gender distinction, and they should just try their best in the girls' section and be happy with that. So without the motivation to chase higher goals, it’s harder for girls to improve as fast as boys as they grow up.

…

I’m just speculating but I wonder whether there is a gender difference when it comes to natural intuition or feel for the game. Because to me, in all aspects of life, sometimes women and men tend to see the same thing from completely different perspectives, and that also comes into chess. I suspect that the male perspective on chess favors men, perhaps when it comes to the emotional aspect of the game and making practical and objective decisions. To put it simplistically, I think male players tend to have a kind of overview or strategy for the whole game, rather than focusing too much attention on one part of the game. It could be interesting to explore this further. I need to do more research to answer this properly!

Differences in inner need to compete

There are quite a few studies on competitive behavior among sexes. In psychology we always have some studies finding positive results and other studies finding no results. Social science studies are notoriously easy to manipulate to get the result you want. This won't be a critical overview, but just a short intro of positive findings.

There is a diary E Cashdan (1998) study where men’s and women’s diaries were compared to look into how they think about competition.

Sex differences, few overall, were as follows: (a) men's diaries contained more same-sex competition, (b) women competed more about looking attractive whereas men competed more about sports, and (c) men used physical (but not verbal) aggression more frequently than women. In Study 2 strength of competition was also measured by questionnaire. Women and men felt equally competitive overall, but men felt more competitive about athletics and sexual attention whereas women felt more competitive about looking attractive.

Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund (2007) found that men were much more eager to pick competitions to solve their tasks in.

A 2011 overview article by the same authors explains it this way:

Laboratory studies have documented that women often respond less favorably to competition than men. Conditional on performance, men are often more eager to compete, and the performance of men tends to respond more positively to an increase in competition. This means that few women enter and win competitions.

Ernesto Reuben, Paola Sapienza & Luigi Zingales (2015) did a study on MBA graduates and found that:

We find that “competitive” individuals earn 9% more than their less competitive counterparts do. Moreover, gender differences in taste for competition explain around 10% of the overall gender gap.

Clément Bosquet,Pierre-Philippe Combes,Cecilia García-Peñalosa (2018) also finds similar competition differences in a promotion system for French academic economists. Here we even see how creating a competitive environment, a condition men thrive in, makes it so that more men get into power.

Women are less likely to seek promotion, and this accounts for up to 76 percent of the promotion gap.

Selin Kesebir, Sun Young Lee, Andrew J. Elliot & Madan M. Pillutla (2019) found that men support competition to a higher degree than women.

A mini meta-analysis (N = 2331) of responses to this scale shows that men attribute more positive outcomes to competition than women. In particular, men are more likely to believe that competition improves performance, builds character, and leads to creative problem-solving.

Overall just creating more competitions, tournaments, chess battles, and chess ranking lists may not have the same effect on attracting female players as male players. Of course women compete too, but just saying "let's create tournaments for women only" is not always the best way to go about achieving your goal of bringing more women into chess overall on all levels. It's just a lazy top-down solution to a problem that may be more complicated than this.

Social needs

If competition alone is not as effective a motivating factor for women as it is for men then what can you do? Obviously chess is a 1 vs. 1 competitive game. Winning motivates some highly competitive people to go all the way to FIDE titles. For others it motivates them to a degree only. Once you stop improving rapidly family life and education may bring you more good feelings than chess depending on your need to compete and win vs. your social needs related to family and close friends.

It's very simple to just throw money at the problem. But in this case it's misunderstanding the wider motivations of the people you want to help. Any top down organizer would intrinsically want to simplify the problem so that more money is the solution on paper.

But from various psychology studies we know that men and women don't act the same way and are not motivated equally by the same factors. Gad Saad (2011) summarized the research in the book, Evolutionary Psychology In The Business Sciences:

Women attach greater importance than men to non-wage aspects of jobs such as relations with coworkers and supervisors, flexible hours, shorter commute time, part-time opportunities, and pleasant surroundings (Konrad et al. 2000). Many of the low-paid jobs occupied by women are low-paid in part because they have these desirable characteristics and are therefore in higher demand.

Social needs are way more important for women when taking part in activities. Free time, safety, and well-being is of greater importance for women than wages because much of their social life is outside the competitive job setting. Gad Saad explains how it works for the job market overall:

The sexes display average differences on a variety of temperamental measures. Males, for example, exhibit greater motivations to achieve certain kinds of extra-domestic success. They display greater direct competitiveness, and competition tends to be a more positive experience for males than it is for females (Benenson et al. 2002). Adding a competitive component to a task increases both the performance and the intrinsic motivation of males but not of females (Van Vugt et al. 2007; Conti et al. 2001). Relatedly, males engage in more dominance behaviors, that is, behaviors designed to obtain power, influence, prerogatives, or resources (Mazur and Booth 1998).

The sexes also differ in their propensity for risk (Byrnes et al. 1999). Men predominate in such risky recreational activities as car racing, skydiving, and hang-gliding (Schrader and Wann 1999), and they are disproportionately represented in risky employment. From 1992 through 2007, men made up between 91% and 93% of all U.S. deaths in the workplace (U.S. Department of Labor 2008a:2, 2009a), a pattern observed in other countries as well (Grazier and Sloane 2008; Lin et al. 2008). Females are more averse not just to physical risk but also to social risk (Larkin and Pines 2003), including financial risk (Fehr-Duda et al. 2006), and this sex difference may in part be responsible for sex differences in achievement-orientation (Arch 1993).

The sexes also differ in nurturance and interest in children, traits that are negatively correlated with such traits as dominance. Females in all societies exhibit more nurturing behavior than males, both inside and outside the family. Throughout the world, women are the primary caretakers of the young, the sick, and the old (Maccoby and Jacklin 1974). This difference, along with those mentioned previously, has substantial workplace effects.

Gad Saad also explains how higher testosterone and will to fight for your place in life creates huge gender differences in the workplace. Risk taking, gambling, domination, and putting your health, freetime, and life on the line is something men are often eager to do if a potential profit is high.

Attitudes toward risk also affect compensation, since, all else being equal, risky jobs pay more than non-risky jobs (Filer 1985). Men predominate in the riskiest jobs; indeed, a list of the most dangerous occupations consists of overwhelmingly male-dominated jobs, such as fisherman, logger, airplane pilot, iron and steel worker, and roofer (U.S. Department of Labor 2009b:16). As previously mentioned, men constitute over 90% of workplace deaths. The higher the proportion of women in an occupation, the less likely it is that the occupation involves hazardous (or otherwise onerous) working conditions (Kilbourne and England 1996).

The relationship between attitudes toward risk and compensation is not limited to physical risk. Some jobs entail substantial “career risk”, such as the line jobs referred to previously. Men have a substantially higher preference for “tournament” situations in which there are winners and losers (Niederle and Vesterlund 2008), such as the “partnership tournament” prevalent in large law firms, under which many associates compete for a limited number of partnerships (Galanter and Palay 1991). Moreover, men are more comfortable than women with compensation systems having a greater component of contingent pay, such as commissions and bonuses, which cause employees to bear more of the risk of short-run variations in performance (Chauvin and Ash 1994).

Instead of taking money from open chess competitions to increased prizes for women only events I suggest focusing on making chess clubs, chess tournaments, and chess sites more social. The monetary prizes are a greater motivating factor in open competitions. Just using the old systems and lazily applying them to a top-down forced affirmative action program may not have as great an effect as one may expect.

What would motivate a person who is not super competitive to play 10 hours of chess a day and maybe reach a GM level? Maybe nothing? It's not naturally a social team game and does require you to be extremely competitive on your own. But there may be some other type of chess we can uncover. A more relaxed and social game.

Just motivation alone can't even make all groups completely equal. There are also inborn talents at play. While men and women have the same average intelligence there are more men at either end of the bell curve. IQ does predict chess skills. If 2 people train the same amount of hours the more talented one will become the better player. Then there is memory and other mental traits where most of the gender differences are likely found. This area requires many more studies though. Right now it's overlooked, but studying this may do more for chess than any other program.