It's not always just about who can become a grand master.. it's also largely a matter of who wants to become it.
All through my life chess has been the epitome of nerdiness, and as a girl you really don't want to be a nerd, at least not in your adolescent life as you can be sure to be shunned that way by everyone else.
Later in life once you're past that, you may try looking into chess, but is totally outmatched by the the boy who played it since he was 6.
So it's a bit more complicated than it may seem.
In early 80ies in Denmark girls were playing chess. After school i went to a sort of "take care of the children until parents sinish work and pick them up"-place, and i remember much chess was played there and it was both girls and boys, it wasnt a boy thing as such. Then it stopped at one point, dont remember why.
And what is that for cultural factor anyway? : ''Laszlo, an educational psychologist by profession, had wanted to demonstrate that what we call 'genius' is not a naturally occurring or genetically created phenomenon, but could be achieved by any child, given intensive early tuition on a one-to-one basis. Chess was a natural way of trying to prove his theory to the world, partly because the game is viewed as a touchstone of the intellect, but also because results are easily compared and measured by a universal grading system. Thus, as Judit put it in her recently published autobiography, How I Beat Fischer's Record: "From the moment of my birth on 23 July 1976, I became involved f in an educational research project. Even before I came into the world, my parents had already decided: I would be a chess champion."
Lazlos "experiment" doesnt count as experiment because of its faulty design.
He has an n of 3, his daughters. This is too low to take it seriously. If he had 100 or 300 involved then would be interesting.
You could maybe make a metastudy and collect hundreds of cases with parents trying to create child prodigies, then you could see if it is possible or not.
I would guess that 99% of them fail and the child doesnt become a prodigy.
And if you could find say 300 successful cases with child prodigies (our of maybe 10.000 failed cases), then you would see the same gender distribution with chess players in general.
I like the Polgar story a lot and she is a cool player and all that, but her case doesnt proove anything. It just doesnt work that way.
Its like trying to prove that men and women doesnt have different gender profiles for body height by finding one "tallest woman in the world".