Opinion- With increasing popularity, it would make it harder for a woman to be world champion

     I doubt that there are reliable statistics on that point but I suspect that Armenia and Azerbaijan, smaller former Soviet republics with a highly-disproportionate share of FIDE titled players, are most likely the leaders.

Well, there is a bit old topic here, so situation might have changed a bit:

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/gm-s-per-capita-worldwide-1-iceland2


Realistically it is probably Armenia if you account smaller population because Armenia has around 3 million people compared to 9 million people in Azerbaijan and  more GMs. But that is only if you account for the number of GMs. Countries of the former Yugoslavia are pretty high on the list as well, because of a relatively high numbers of GMs and titled players in general compared to their small populations.

There is a newer information here:

https://www.chess.com/article/view/countries-with-the-most-chess-grandmasters

There is a link to a spreadsheet on the bottom but only by total GMs.

I don't know...

I'd rather start from the fact that men and women are different... not so much different that we should expect a 200 point rating gap (which we don't see in reality, so that's good) but it's stupid to say everyone is equally capable.

Next I'd like to reevaluate the criteria for what makes a human being superior. Does obsessively spending hours on chess make one human superior to another? It seems just as easy to argue "no" as the opposite.

Well, there are not many female GMs in the world in general (I think only 37 earned their GM title since 1950. so it is certainly less than that today). And as Serbia didn't have world class GMs for a long time, we didn't have world class female players for a long time as well.  Alisa Maric was a contender for women Championship title at her peak, but she is an IM with peak rating of around 2490.

Basically, we have many titled players which shows chess tradition, but we do not have contenders on the highest level.

Well, it's a bit false, because the brains are different. It's not just hormones.

But sure, unsurprisingly there's both nature and nurture involved i.e. society matters too.

Well, this is a problem too, because men traditionally dominate STEM fields and business which have been extremely "productive."

But again, I'd like to ask whether that makes someone a good human being. Medicine and technology has allowed the human population to grow to over 7 billion and increase the quality of life for all... why does that matter? We all die anyway. Eventually humans will be extinct. It's all pointless in the end.

What I mean is, there's no, let's say, metaphysical higher ideal that implies someone pursuing excellence medicine (for example) is a superior in some way to someone who is not pursuing excellence in any field.

Those are very different groups

You should instead compare "all the women you have ever met" to "all the boys you have ever met" and you'd see that the average male is not interested in chess either (people in general are not interested in chess).

Instead you compare the average women you have met, to males who already play chess... well of course those groups are different, those who have already chosen chess are outlies to begin with.

I've been suggesting this since #28.

Oh you mean WGMs, well those are less rare. Well, we still produce GMs today, so to speak, but at best they are slightly over 2 600.We have one younger prospect that was pretty solid in World cup, and might have a shot to go over 2 700, but nothing is certain. But as this is not the topic, I will not speak about him.

In general, If the ratio male/female chess players changes in the future, I am sure that we will see more world class female players. And why not, perhaps someone even stronger than Polgar at certain point.

@llama47 ... come on. Boys obsess about competitive activities generally. You see this at a young age on the playground. They're poisoned, rage-filled, gorilla wannabes who "like the moment they break a man's ego."

The poisoning causes them to want to seek a wasted life as a professional board game player with a near-zero chance of success. That's just really dumb. Tell me, how many posts by *women* have you seen on chesscom that start "can I be a GM one day?" I've counted exactly zero, and there have been at least 47,000 of them.

That is not correct. We have multiple WGMs on active list, I am just looking at it.

Teodora Injac, Jovana Rapport, Andjelija Stojanovic, Jordanka Belic, Maria Manakova, Jovana Eric, Ana Benderac, and I count 5 more on the list. That is of course not counting inactive players.

Do you even know a woman?   

Nope, I've shown 7 links there, but I've stated that there are 5 more on the list that I just didn't want to show because 7 links is already enough to see that it is not just 2.

So there are 12 in total on active list.

Ah ok, I understand. I am looking at the official FIDE list. Wiki can be incomplete.

The easy way is to google fide list with country you wish to see. Then you click on + show list options, then just choose options (female players for instance) and you should see.

Yes Yifan is great, she is in top 100. I've heard that she is not really pursuing it on professional level (in a sense that she is working on some university if I am not mistaken along with chess career). So she probably has the potential to get 2 700 if she put her mind into it.

Hm, I don't know if it will work or it will just show the list without advanced options. Here goes:

https://ratings.fide.com/rankings.phtml?continent=0&country=SRB&rating=standard&gender=F&age1=0&age2=0&period=2021-12-01&period2=1

It seems that it works, I think it didn't when I tried something like this in the past.

She'd probably have become 2700 a year or two ago if she hadn't decided a faculty position was more respectable, or prestigious, or whatever she decided.  I guess that's evidence for the "testosterone poisoned boys are more competitively oriented" theory.

No, wiki is just incomplete. All of them are active on this list. Our 2 best female chess players of all time are probably Alisa Maric and Natasa Bojkovic, they are both IMs, and are not on this list (there are probably more that are not on the list) because one didn't play since 2010. and the other since 2015. In the past I think there was the option to include inactive players as well somehow, but I don't see the option now. Now I can only google specific FIDE profile to see the profile of an inactive player.

That is why Nakamura is out of standard list, because he didn't play a standard game for some fixed amount of time (I am not sure for how much exactly).

So I wasn't completely wrong, yes I heard something like this.