separate tournaments for women in chess?

why is that so? it is not a physical game and I always thought that both the sexes are equally mentally capable.

UH OH

It's because there are so few women in chess that the governing body felt that it would encourage them if they have thier own league.

I dont believe this. It is hard to believe. This is a false reason. May be they say so to not humilate them. 

Women would start flirting if they played against men which would distract them. So it's better they play against other women. (The Lesbians play against men I think?)

Allow me to elucidate the reasons behind this...

There is unlikely to be a female in the top 10 unless a great deal more women start to play competitively.

Let me flesh this out.

If you have 99 male players for every female player; the odds of any given player being female is 1 out of 100. This should be expected for any given category, (ignoring the possibility that women are discouraged from progressing in chess). The higher skilled females players have to have been unskilled beginners at one point, so the proportion of skilled players who are female should be the same as the proportion of unskilled players who are female, etc, etc.

I saw somewhere on the forums that about 2% of GMs are female. If gender makes no difference in chess ability, I might expect that the female proportion of the total population to be very simlar. So, if 2% of players are female, and we look at the top 1000 we should expect to see about 20 (lets say 18-22, variation is a fact of life).

Likewise if 98% of players are male, it would be not be unlikely that all the top 100 players be male, given that the proportion in any given sample can have a certain amount of deviation.

We can expect the deviation of direct measurements (say, ELO rating) to be larger among females, but, counter-intuitively, we would get far fewer very extreme cases (very very far from the average), but we might expect that the average performance of both genders should be similar. This is all to say that with normal variation, we can expect the proportion of women in any sample to appear far more variable than the proportion of men. IE: 1-3% is a much greater deviation than 97-99%, but when samples are small (IE the top 10, 50, 100 or 200) even larger variations would not necessarily be surprising or meaningful. Likewise we can expect the sample mean to vary considerably more, even though we can expect that individual values will not stray to the same level of extremes as the larger population.

So what I just described above is a very informal way of looking at a mathematical concept in statistics that states that when sample sizes shrink to the point that one expects less than 10 "successes" from an established population proportion, that the sample cannot be trusted to represent the population and likewise small samples are not reliable when dealing with sample averages either.

IF the figure that 2% of GMs are female is used to suggest that women are 2% of all competitive chess players in the open class, then the smallest sample size that would be reasonably reliable for determining if women make up a proportionate number of players in any given category would be 500 (500 x .02 = 10). So, the statement someone made in another forum post that there are only two women in the top 150 players is not a reliable statistic against the potential of women to play chess at world class levels, but it does mean that women in general might not be that interested in watching chess (since they don't have many women to relate to).

Why do we see so few women among high ranking players? When you are looking at a population proportion as small as those who can competively play chess in the top 100, the fact that women make up such a small portion of the total competitive pretty much means that you can expect to see no women at the top level, even if women are just as good as men at playing chess. It's a matter of statistical mathematics. There just aren't enough of them in chess to guarentee to see much female representation at the top. This, I believe, is the main reason why a seperate women's league exists; because it is statistically unreasonable to expect to see a woman in top 50, and a seperate league gives women as a group something to shoot for and because women should be encouraged to play chess. This tactic worked in proffessional billiard's, women's leagues were successful in broadening the audience, this is a similar situation where the physical aspect of the game does not particularly favor one gender.

If anyone has reliable statistics for this sort of informaion, or could show and actual FIDE statement regarding thier motivation for forming the women's league, I'd be interested in it. I thought about sending FIDE an email, but the wide range of potentially important statistics is pretty boggling and I just dont have the background to say what those would be.