Ruth Haring: 'Girls are bad at chess'

It again depends on how you set the standard in "intellectual achievements".
For me, rather than writers, it is more philosophers and poets. Being a writer (especially nowadays) take not much, just look at all the garbage that gets published. I could, though recommend you lots of female poets and philosophers that lived in ancient greece or china.
Things were a lot different in Europe, of course. After all, again, we could say that writing a book is another time consuming activitiy that women tend not to engage in while writing poems are usually more intuitive.

M. Bilalić and friends argue in Why are (the best) women so good at chess? Participation rates and gender differences in intellectual domains that "96 per cent of the observed difference would be expected given the much greater number of men who play chess" among the top 100 German male and female chess players".

A follow-up paper by M. Knapp criticizes (reasonably imho) their use of the normal distribution, and provides a statistical model that matches the observed ratings better, finding "between 41 and 71.1 per cent (mean value: 66.9%) of the actual rating differences are explained by different participation rates of men and women".

More recently, a paper published just this month by R. Howard, Gender Differences in Intellectual Performance Persist at the Limits of Individual Capabilities, tries to determine whether the differential participation explanation for chess holds up by comparing across countries that have very different participation rates among international players:

The hypothesis that males predominate because many more males play chess was tested by comparing gender performance differences in nations with varying percentages of female players. In well-practised participants, gender performance differences stayed constant even when the average national percentage of female international players increased from 4.2% to 32.3%.

I haven't read the paper, as I only have access to the abstract, but unless there are any flaws that come to light with the paper, it sounds like this puts to rest the argument that differential participation rates are the main reason for the observed discrepancies in ratings, which was the explanation that I thought most likely until now.

The participation discrepency explanation fails miserably , just consider bridge .  More women play bridge than men and yet men dominate the top positions . 

George Eliot, the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Harriet Beecher Stowe, etc.

The argument I had in mind wasn't that it explained observed differences across all fields, but for chess alone, so bridge is completely irrelevant.

But the chain of reasoning in the Howard paper appears to be sound, as long as his analysis of the data holds up and there aren't any methodological flaws, but I don't have access to the paper and so can't read the details.

Thank you, sapientdust, reb, corrijean, and p_l_m_w for adding some additional context.

I have wondered if differences in brain morphology and/or chemistry plays a part.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/men-women-different-brains1.htm

"If I am lucky enough to have another 20 or so years on this planet, I fully expect to see a female challenge for the chess championship of the world"

I don't expect it will happen in the next 20 years. This far Polgar is quite unique in the history of the game, and no other woman looks even remotely close to her peak level, when she briefly reached a top ten spot, but never was close to the best players. In classical she had 0-22 against Kasparov + Kramnik. Hou is a great talent but if she ever will be top 50 is doubtful.

Women don't mind losing but the dudes have issues with it, so the cream is alway dude.

Well, Blutarsky, I have learned to never argue with a Delta ;^)

Bluto: Hey! What's all this laying around stuff? Why are you all still laying around here for?

Stork: What the hell are we supposed to do, ya moron? We're all expelled. There's nothing to fight for anymore.

D-Day: [to Bluto] Let it go. War's over, man. Wormer dropped the big one.

Bluto: What? Over? Did you say "over"? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!

Otter: [to Boon] Germans?

Boon: Forget it, he's rolling.

Bluto: And it ain't over now. 'Cause when the goin' gets tough...

[thinks hard of something to say]

Bluto: The tough get goin'! Who's with me? Let's go!

[Bluto runs out, alone; then returns]

Bluto: What the fuck happened to the Delta I used to know? Where's the spirit? Where's the guts, huh? This could be the greatest night of our lives, but you're gonna let it be the worst. "Ooh, we're afraid to go with you Bluto, we might get in trouble." Well just kiss my ass from now on! Not me! I'm not gonna take this. Wormer, he's a dead man! Marmalard, dead! Niedermeyer...

Otter: Dead! Bluto's right. Psychotic... but absolutely right. We gotta take these bastards. Now we could do it with conventional weapons, but that could take years and cost millions of lives. No, I think we have to go all out. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part!

Bluto: We're just the guys to do it.

D-Day: [stands up] Yeah, I agree. Let's go get 'em.

Boon: Let's do it.

Bluto: [shouting] "Let's do it"!

[all of the Deltas stand up and run out with Bluto]

(Dialogue from IMDB.com)

I remember the ribbing some of the young high-school-aged guys got from their teammates when they lost to a girl.  A few would take a loss against the clock to save face.  "Issues" is an understatement.  A loss to a female could be crushing (in those days).

It seems to me that women chess players are aware of their power to destroy, and prefer to nurture instead.

Yeah, women just pretend to not have as much muscle and be shorter to make men feel better :)

Don't be fooled by my 2000 rating, I just pretend to not be a 3100 level chess player because I don't want Carlsen to be disappointed in himself!

But in all seriousness, the whole "be manly" thing and for girls, "be feminine at all costs" seems so arbitrary. If you ask why one should be manly or feminine, the only response you will get is that other people think that's what you should do, but then when you ask those people they'll just say the same thing -- the reasoning is in a big circle. To me it makes more sense to do things because it is actually desirable to you, and let that thing fall into whatever gender role it may. Easier said than done, sure.

I already conceded to point regarding sexual dimorphism and physical differences.

I agree with your observation that there exist societal gender expectations.   If we can pull those down, I think society will, on the whole, be more tolerant and accepting, and less like to discriminate based on sex and gender differences.

I see no real reason why women can not be mens' equals in a game that depends little on morphological differences between the sexes.

Girls will never be the equal of dudes in chess. Just as cats will never be as good as dogs at soiling the street.

But you're taking it as read that those morphological differences apply only to musculature and possession of a uterus. We're told quite earnestly that there are such things as "male brains" and "female brains" when we're discussing people's rights to be treated as members of their non-birth gender so why do we suddenly decide there's no such thing when we start to look at intellectual achievements?

Fortunately, men's propensity to sit around wasting time on useless things when they should have been keeping the cave tidy and helping to watch the children has led to the discovery of fire, metallurgy, literacy, law, democracy, philosophy, the steam engine, the railroad, electricity, medicine, electronics, the internal combustion engine... we may possibly be despoiling the planet but at least we aren't picking fleas out of each other's fur and wondering why Ug suddenly dropped dead for no reason.

Senator-Blutarsky wrote:

Girls will never be the equal of dudes in chess. Just as cats will never be as good as dogs at soiling the street.

Now THAT is funny.

[COMMENT NOT DELETED]

lillhopsin.........where have you been ? There are surveys that indicate females have taken over both male and female roless. In fact us wee men dont know our TRUE identity anymore. Its our fault sure or maybe they have manipulated us into our submissive role to gain an advantage over us. THE FACTS STAND the female brains are now more masculine. They are fearless..take initiative ...show leadership qualities ...they are tenacious ..

AND CAN PLAY GOOD CHESS if they allow time for it. Out of the 12,000 - 13,000 visitors / members that visit chess.com what % are females. we will never know because they wont reveal that with their " handle " name

You 've ben wacked by a female chess player and dont even know it.

Oh, I agree with you that morphological differences extend to the brain.  Recent medical studies are amply demonstrating that.  And those differences extend back to the time the fetus is developing in utero.  No argument from me.

Young females have proven advantages over their male counterparts in the use of language and fine motor skills; whereas boys seems to be more adept at math, geometry, and spacial relationships.  Males have more "gray matter," female more "white matter."

We also know that there is a significant amount of overlap in things mistakenly described as "gender specific skills."  Many of the so-called differences are largely generalizations.

So, as applied to chess, how do males and females process information differently?  Or does it really come down to men being more aggressive or competitive (hormonal differences)?

As I look at the list of female players who have achieved the GM title through qualifying norms and ratings, I note how many are young, free from having to conform to gender roles (such as "mothering" or "keeping house"), and who come from China, the ex-Soviet Bloc, India, and other areas where Anglo-American societal norms do not/did not apply.

Thank you for your thought-provoking comments.

To be fair the "skillset" for chess is hard to list due to its complexity. You can't just chock it all up to "math, spatial relationships" or something like that. It's a bunch of skills all intertwined, psychological, practical (e.g. time management), mathematical, philosophical. Then there's your willingness to study for the game and persevere, which again can lead to the thought that women are more well rounded and don't consider putting the time in a good idea. Etc, etc, etc... :)

So it's kind of hard to pinpoint what's going on. I think social stuff, and indeed the psychology of stereotypes, has a lot to do with it, but does it explain the entire difference in performance? It's kind of a huge difference. We know for sure that it explains a fair portion, but to know for sure that it explains the whole thing? Seems like a really hasty jump to me -- it could be true, but to me there's not nearly enough information to feel sure about something like that. It's one thing to say the method of raising a child will influence them; it's quite another to say that it works like magic, that it is the only thing that can shape a person and everything else is just a really really clever illusion. I'm not just talking about chess; just "perceived" differences in general, like women being more emotional, men being more jerkish, whatever.

I must say it makes a change to see such an interesting and intelligent thread on females in chess... when I first saw it, I expected the worst.  I'll enjoy reading more.