FIDE Rating - Male vs Female

Was digging around some old files and found this picture I'd saved. It was from a many years old chess.com topic where a user claimed to have gotten access to some FIDE stats.

This is for middle-aged players only. You'll notice on the left side of the curve there is very little difference, and on right side of the curve females are rated about 70 points lower than males.

I'm not going to interpret it beyond that. I'm mostly posting for posterity. I'll do my best to block trolls, but the way these things go, it will probably eventually be locked anyway.

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I didn't realize the 'W' titles came out in different years. From wiki:

WIM: 1950
WGM: 1976
WFM: 1978
WCM (and CM): 2002

Certainly attitudes towards women were different in those days, so the values reflected by those titles may not fit in the 21st century.

However, it's also true that females are underrepresented in chess. From both a business and an egalitarian point of view it may make sense to incentivize female players to play.

The effectiveness of these titles in meeting those goals, as well as the implications of their existence in the first place, are often debated.

Similarly, the average rating of female vs male players is often debated. One interesting thing about this graph is that I think it shows the difference is not as large as many people believe. In fact below 2000 it seems there is practically no difference at all, and the only large gap is at the very-very top.

I don't know why this needs to be discussed, what's the point? What we need to do is to make the chess community more welcoming to women, and this sort of discussion tends to achieve the exact opposite.

Good job resisting the urge to add more flames to the fire. You even foreshadowed that this discussion would inevitably end bad, yet you still proceeded to post this. What a shame!

InB4 the lock

inb4 the lock

Before attempting to draw any conclusions from this data, it is important to realize that the data as presented here are ill-defined and plotted incorrectly. 

"Middle-aged" is not defined, it is not clear when this data was compiled, and it is not clear what rating is being discussed.  It is most likely "standard fide rating", but that is not explicit.

Beyond that, the histogram as plotted here just can't be right.  The y-axis can not be recording "frequency" if the bins are the same width for both the male and female histograms.  This is because there simply are not as many FIDE-rated female players.  There is something like a factor of 10 difference for active, standard-rated players aged 30-59 (by my quick analysis from the October 2022 FIDE data).  Whomever plotted this data must have done some other scaling/manipulation that is not clear.

Anyway, there is no need to copy and paste some anonymous user's probably-wrong plot from a years-old forum "for posterity".  FIDE makes its up-to-date data freely available for download on their website.

People on this thread will inevitably make the false conclusion that "men are more intelligent than women" based on this "evidence."

First and foremost, I don't know where you got this data. To make any conclusions based off of it is ridiculous. A "picture I'd saved" is not sufficient. Secondly, assuming that it is true, there are problems with jumping to any conclusion. Women are underrepresented in the chess community. To try and make broad sweeping claims about one sex is detached from reality and inaccurate. 

There wasn't any need to post this. Its nothing but smoke and will be used to cause drama.

I never mentioned intelligence.

I also never said it wasn't reasonable that fewer women play than men (but I do think a 10 to 1 ratio points to something wrong, because men and women aren't that different).

As is typical with contentious topics, my full views would make some people on both sides angry.

I didn't realize the data was publicly available.

What says the bins are different widths?

I agree the Y axis is unclear because otherwise the graphs wouldn't overlap like this, but if it were normalized (y axis between 0 and 1 i.e. as a percentage) then that would explain why they overlap even though males outnumber females.

My points are still valid. This is not an accurate source and we can not draw any conclusions based on this. People will weaponize it (as we've already seen xFallesafe do "Why can’t you social justice white-knights understand that men and women are DIFFERENT??").

I agree with goodspellr and BlueScreenRevenge. I also made a correction to my original post because you did not say anything about intelligence. However, I feel like the conclusions we are supposed to make are heavily implied and wrong. 

Sure, your comments are reasonable, I'm not saying you're wrong, just giving my point of view. I don't think information is ever incorrect to share, but challenging that this is just a random graph because I've given nothing to back it up, and challenging whether the chess.com forums are a good place for this discussion are reasonable arguments to make.

Women-only events are a well-intentioned effort to encourage more female activity in a male dominant game but it also implies that women are inferior to men in chess.

Elephant brains are 3-4 times larger than human brains, but they haven't sent anything to the moon.

Male and female human brains are physiologically different, and tend to have different strengths and weaknesses, but those differences are fairly academic. Overall men and women are very similar, even having the same average IQ.

In the end, since 13 year olds can be GMs (and since Karjakin is no genius) intelligence is not the limiting factor. In fact Naka scored 102 on a IQ-like test and he's one of the best players in the world.

Anyway, that's one reason I think this graph is interesting, it shows males and females are very similar in chess too... much more than the average chess player might assume.