Ruth Haring: 'Girls are bad at chess'

Well, the Polgár girls were raised to be geniuses. I believe it was Susan (Zsuzsa) who willingly went under brain tests and different exams made by machines in a documentary about this. They found there is actually nothing of extraordinary in her brain, it was all "just" the result of hard work and study.
Go and read their father's study, it really is worth it, how he explains the whole theory, as it was actually a theory of his, he wanted to prove supergeniuses can be raised with the perfect method.
So there's that. The behaviorists are somewhat right. Of course chess and all of these games require a fair amount of natural talent of all kinds as you said, but the "Polgár case" has lots of truth in it.

I agree, it's a very cool study, and it would be a strange coincidence for him to "just happen" to have three super talented girls, at the exact same skill, and a rather esoteric one at that. But that alone will have a hard time settling the issue, simply because these things are inherently hard to settle. For example, this study may show that hard work and encouragement are the main ingredients, but that doesn't mean that certain amounts of talent wouldn't make it even easier. Maybe they would have been 2800 for example if they had "even more" talent. Or maybe not -- we can't really know, despite how much we may want to :)

But still, the study was quite a phenomenon, quite intriguing.

Very good points, Elubus.  I do believe there are differences in how males and females approach thinking, reasoning, intuition, etc.  But there is more commonality in male and female thinking, than there is between human intelligence and artificial intelligence.

The very best women players certainly are in the top 1% of all players.  I would guess that the distribution would follow the 68-95-99.7 rule.  The very best players in the world are in that top 0.3%, and that would include a proportional number of women (relative to their numbers in the entire population of the chess community worldwide).

It seems to me that the objective differences between the best male and female players are actually minute.  But it is tough to draw broad conclusions from out at the 3-sigma tail of a Gaussian distribution.

I would be interested to see a dataset of all ratings by sex and experience, and compare the means.

and people like you wonder why you're disliked.

A couple of interesting articles that are somewhat related to the topic:

http://www.popsci.com/article/science/stop-looking-%E2%80%9Chardwired%E2%80%9D-differences-male-and-female-brains

http://www.popsci.com/article/science/qa-what-feminist-biology

It is certainly possible!  There are so many better female players today than there were 30 years ago.  I am just amazed.  I feel like I have been awakened from an Austin Powers-type deep sleep.

More power to you Sunshine.  You are part of the New Wave.  I mentioned in another post two of the ladies in the US who were the top player when I was last active.  They were Master-level (USCF 2200-2399) players.  I really don't recall an American female Senior Master.  Most of the other good girls/women I knew were B-level and A-level players (sorry about the old terminology).  And a few Experts.

There exists a legion of men who will put us down for daring to tread into their arena.  You best represent your gender over the board with your skill and ability, rather than getting into pissing contests.  They (men) have an advantage there! Aim, you know ;^)

You might want to go and check your biology. Women cannot create a new life in their body, they only grow it. 

It takes 2 to tango baby.

In this day and age, in vitro fertilization makes the physical presence of the "sperm donor" superfluous.  There are potential problems with IVF though.

The very first time it was tried, the baby was born all covered in bacteria, mold, and fungus.  It was just terrible, but entirely predictable ... as they say, "Spare the rod, spoil the child."

<I'm evil - I admit it>

There's also cloning on the horizon.........

NOT for me!! <hehe>

Where ever in the world did you hear this absurdity?

It is absolutely NOT true.

As Jamie said, possibly, but it's a pretty convenient assumption, don't you think? So really, I could have been like Magnus Carlsen but I just didn't care quite as much as him. I can devalue just about anyone's skill in this way.

Like I said, there are many social factors at play, but there is nothing that can allow someone to make the jump from "These definitely play some role" to "They play 100% of the role." We can only speculate about that.

"There exists a legion of men who will put us down for daring to tread into their arena. "

Not in my case -- I fully encourage women to give it a shot -- more power to them.

It is an old joke ...

"Spare the rod (penis) ...

Spoil (bacteria, mold, fungus) the child."

The original adage dealt with cost/benefit of punishing children.  On a similar vein, Winston Churchill was alleged to have stated ...

"…when Winston was at the Admiralty, the Board objected to some suggestion of his on the grounds that it would not be in accord with naval tradition. ‘Naval tradition? Naval tradition?’ said Winston. ‘Monstrous. Nothing but rum, sodomy, prayers and the lash.’"

Yes, I got the joke (as it were).

I was just wondering about the statement that the first IVF baby was covered with bacteria, mold and fungus.

That was the "set up" for the punch line. ;^)

Rule #1 - Jamie is not an entirely serious person, and enjoys an occasional prank or joke.  (Just look at the avatar!!)

I see. That's a long way to go for such a bad joke.

It is a weakness! ;^)

I'd be lying if I said I never suffered from it myself.

Along with many other female writers. In fact, here's another list of female writers since you seemed so certain in that other thread that there were few. And before you say "all the writer's you listed are a drop in the literary bucket", well of course they are. It's obviously far from a complete list, which is why I put an etc at the end, to indicate that there are more than just those I have listed. And none of that "legit writer" nonesense. This list is not based on personal preferences, yours (as if I could know what you prefer, not personally knowing you) or mine. I selected writers based on whether they've contributed works generally considered to be of note. Anyway, here's the list.

Murasaki Shikibu, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Caroline Louisa Waring Atkinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Liang Desheng, Ada Lovelace, Anne Donovan, Annie M.G. Schmidt, Margaret Fuller, Virginia Esther Hamilton, Esther Friesner, etc.

       Not so. The tendency for world beating swimmers to be younger than in other sports is more pronounced in women than in men. Eg, they beat world records on average at a younger age than men and their careers do not extend as long as men.