About the gender gap in chess performance

Here is a cool theory:

(...)What is the best age for rising talents to immerse themselves so deeply into chess that the structures required to achieve true excellence are hardwired into the brain? Obviously this can only happen in their teen years. Just as in language, if you have not learnt all the grammatical and idiomatic intricacies, all the patterns and all the relations between them, by the time you are twenty, you may still become a competent speaker (or chessplayer) but will never progress to the very highest levels.

Now there is a big difference between the environment for boys and girls during their teen years. Girls become interesting to older boys, who look out for them and offer interesting activities outside of chess. A sixteen-year-old female chess talent will usually have boys with driving licences and cars asking them out to meals and movies – or other exciting things. The point is that a sixteen-year-old male talent is very rarely picked up by nineteen-year-old girls with fun and distraction on their minds. They stick with chess, by necessity, while their female colleagues are experimenting with other games and entertainment.

So: as a male the probability is much higher that you will have dedicated yourself to acquiring the basic skills and mental structures required to achieve true excellence in chess, because at the only time that this was possible you really had nothing else to do – or nothing to seriously distract you.

This theory has not been empirically or statistically tested in the way Kane and Mertz did in their study. We base it only on observation of dozens or so very young female talents that we encountered (and tried to foster). Many were indistinguishable from young male talents, but all of them ended a few hundred points from the very top. Many were deeply determined and seemed on the way to reaching the highest rankings, but inevitably they stopped at the GM level and did not proceed to the very top (with of course the one big exception).

We did conduct one test – inadvertently. During a recent tournament I expounded the theory during a minibus ride and got the following reactions from two very attractive members of the press staff, girls in their early twenties: "You are telling this to two WGMs who started off well and never made it to the top?!" – "Oh, sorry," I replied, "I did not think of that. Is it completely implausible?" – "No," one of them replied, "I think you hit the nail right on the head!"

Frederic Friedel

Full article here: http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7881

apparently this theorist does not know very many sixteen year old boys if they think that there are more 16 year old girls (percentage wise) goofing off than 16 year old boys.

Hmm... it's an interesting hypothesis.  My own sense is that the gender disparity in chess is a complex phenomenon, and probably isn't reducible to one or two variables (although your hypothsis may offer a partial explanation).  For instance, at the other end of the performance spectrum, I've observed that proportionally more males are attracted to chess as rank beginners, which of course would mean that there'd be a comparatively larger pool of potential male GM's from the very beginning -- irrespective of women's earlier romantic involvements.  Another thing that complicates your hypothesis is that although males do seem to begin romantic involvements at a later average age, male adolescents also seem to have a higher rate of other types of distractions -- such as a more common rate of involvement in sports, for instance.  Finally, it seems to me that your hypothesis would become more convincing if you could find a way of controlling for possible extraneous social factors.  For instance, it seems to me that in the West, there's still a general aura of social disapproval around the very idea that women should be allowed to compete seriously against men in any arena (think of how many sports have seperate events and prizes for men and women, even when it doesn't seem particularly warranted by differences in physicality).  This kind of generalized social disapproval, whose effect might well be quite subtle, would naturally make it more difficult for women to enjoy competitive success against men -- again, irrespective of women's earlier romantic involvements.  All in all, there would seem to be many likely factors at play here, in addition to the one you're describing.  Probably it would take protracted formal empirical study to ascertain which factors are the most important ones.