What if a girl became World Chess Champion?

This is one of the more sexist things that have been posted on this thread, at least when it's stated like this.

"I don't see chess, or doing the crossword puzzle, or sudoku, or the Jumble, as a waste of time.  We all deserve some time to ourselves, and these games and puzzles are intellectual stimulation."

Good point.

I believe to some degree that girls' participation in chess, as well as in other activities, has been passively (sometimes actively) discouraged, at least in the US.  I don't feel girls should necessarily be urged in the direction of playing chess, but the atmosphere should be, and it is so much better today, that it's a perfectly acceptable activity for girls.  I think that's all anyone can ask for. (I say "girls" because that's where it all starts.)

Thumbs up for you, Mr. Grobe sir. Epic WIN

Can you name a society, present or in the last few hundred years, where women had social equality?

Native American societies were often matriarchal or at least matrilineal. Although that was a little longer back.

I didn't know that.

Women have, at various times in the past, though not currently, held the world record for swimming the English channel.  So there's ultra-long-distance swimming.

Marie Curie is the only person to have two different Nobel Prizes in science -- one in physics, one in chemistry.

Marilyn vos Savant may be the world champion of being famous for having a high IQ.  Chris Langan got some publicity from Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers and his appearance on 1 vs. 100, so she may not.  (Langan's wife, Gina LoSasso, was formerly married to Ben Finegold and played on the 1986 women's Olympiad team.)

That is just sexist tripe.  There are many women who have been the foremost in their fields.  Let's look at Elizabeth I of England.  She was clearly the most successful monarch of her day.

Let's add to that list Golda Meir, who held at bay every Moslem leader arrayed against her, winning the Yom Kippur War.

Margaret Thatcher, along with Ronald Reagan and John Paul II are deservedly credited with winning the Cold War.  Her leadership was key to that accomplishment.

Or perhaps Indira Gandhi of India.  Through her leadership, she helped shaped southern Asia for years to comes.  She named the "Woman of the Millennium" by the BBC in 1999.

Joan of Arc saved the French nation and was later made a Saint.

Julia Child was the leading French chef of her day.  (Interestingly, she was likely a 46,xy CAIS woman)

I won't even get into literature and the arts - it is too subjective.  But, needless to say, women there have won the awards (Pulitzer, Nobel, Academy Awards, etc) for being the best in their field with men as comnpetiton.

When given the opportunity, women can and will rise to the occasion.

"(Langan's wife, Gina LoSasso, was formerly married to Ben Finegold and played on the 1986 women's Olympiad team.)"

Wow, really?

Yep.  Her last name was Linn at the time of the Olympiad, though.

From the guy that said all women players are egomaniacs :)

without being able to counter the statement.

Elubas wrote:

Glass-Spider wrote:

If its dumb, the guys will take it more seriously and master it.

This is one of the more sexist things that have been posted on this thread, at least when it's stated like this.

It could be sexist tripe, but your failure to actually answer the question at all by the list you give points to the ways in which the question may, in fact, be rather interesting.

The reason is that the question can easily be construed to be getting at whether the concept of being a "world champion" at something is inherently tilted toward men, regardless of the field.  This is in absolutely no way the same as asking if women can excel at something.  It is asking whether women tend less to seek concrete titles, or tend less to win concrete titles, and if so, why.  Is there something about the competitive notion of specific individual championships that makes them more appealing to men or more winable by men?

Consequently, there are women world champions.  I recall a woman becoming world eating champion some time back, maybe she still is.  The list that jumps to mind, however, is indeed small, especially if we exclude women-only competitions (which is naturally what the question demands).

I think men tend to be more fanatical about games/sports  etc ...  I will relate a true personal story of my own that , I think , reveals a bit on this topic . My first wife didnt know how to play chess when we married and I was already a rated tournament player . She didnt want to play chess with me which is understandable and showed no interest in learning the game but she liked several games , like scrabble . One year she suggested we learn a game to play together that neither of us knew and I agreed . She chose backgammon so we bought a set and learned the rules of the game .  She won about 70% of the time and was elated and wanted to play regularly .  I didnt like losing and when we went to a bookstore I bought a couple of books on backgammon and studied them .  Suddenly I was the one winning 70% of the time and what was her answer ? She got angry and fussed at me for " being that way "  and " ruining the game " by studying it ! She claimed I had taken the fun out of the game and she quit playing completely , instead of studying the books herself .  So it was fun to her when she was winning but when I was winning it wasnt fun and I had ruined the game ... 

I vibe well with this anecdote.  I wish I had some evidence to back it up, but it strikes me that men are, indeed, more likely to do something like go and study backgammon rather than just playing it.

But, to me, that's not necessarily a strike against women in the least.  I'm not at all sure that I'm proud of the time I've put into improving my chess game (especially given the results).  For a master like you, it's a bit different perhaps.  Still, this type of behavior pattern would do much to explain the low percentage of female titled players without resorting to absurd bunk like women being "inferior."

(NM Reb) She claimed I had taken the fun out of the game and she quit playing completely , instead of studying the books herself .  So it was fun to her when she was winning but when I was winning it wasnt fun and I had ruined the game ... 

Maybe she just liked connecting with you and placed the results as down the list somewhere. See where I'm going with all this ?

Enjoy chess without worrying about winning. Enjoy its complexities and interesting positions. It'll remove the exercise in frustration. Try it !....watch your rating go up....you don't believe me, do you ?

Now, if you can't understand that, then you're probably being driven solely by ego....bad bad bad.

Yes , Lola I do and I am not trying to put her down in any way .  Its just that men tend to be fanatical about games/sports/hobbies and women do not .  Ofcourse there are some exceptions out there , on both sides .  I hate losing so much that I will work hard to get better at something or simply give it up completely rather than lose at it more than I win .  The fault may well be with me and other male " fanatics " .  I tried tennis and sucked at it , so gave it up as I was unwilling to put in the time/effort to get good at it .  

Being English, my sympathies for Elizabeth I are where they should be - but where is the evidence to show that she was the "most successful monarch of her day"? Admittedly it was no mean feat to preserve English independence in the political climate of the time, but I think the thesis would need a little further development... beginning perhaps with a discussion of the other monarchs of the time and why they don't stack up to Gloriana.

Golda Meir - does anyone seriously deny that Israel owes a lot of the credit for its continued existence to the United States's willingness to prop it up? The rights and wrongs of the case I'll leave to others to discuss, but most certainly at the time you had the US-backed Israel on one side of the picture and the Soviet-backed Arabs on the other, and whether Golda Meir made the crucial difference, again, is an idea that needs further development; simply asserting it to be the case is not intellectually rigorous enough.

The only thing I'll say about Indira Gandhi (other than that the family name probably helped an awful lot) is that it should hardly come as a surprise that the "Woman of the Millennium" (talking about subjective awards) should have been a woman.

As to the sciences and the arts, it's true you could fill most of a page with high-achieving women... and the rest of the book would be men. It's even largely true of fields like cookery and fashion design, in which if there is any cultural gender bias at all it is against boys' involvement.

Reference the question in the title... it's very much a case of "what if?". The only woman to ever present a credible possibility of being world champion was Judit Polgar, and there I think you might be saying that she was a credible possibility the way Nigel Short was (of whom Kasparov said, with perfect accuracy, "that the opponent will be Short and the match will be short" - which, again, it pains me as an Englishman to admit).

On the one side we have the evidence that women do not achieve at the highest level in chess, and on the other we have only the assertion that they can and they will. I beg leave to side with the former until the argument shows more evidence for the latter, and in the mean time, excuses for non-achievement are simply that.

NEVER WILL HAPPEN!!!!!!!!!!