Why are there so little female chess players?

In before the lock!!

Nobody is saying that every single woman is worse than every single man. Sure if a woman spends 50 hours on chess she will be better than a man who has spent 50 minutes. The debate is, what if both women and men spend the same hours? men seem to perform way better in those scenarios. Or men tend to simply spend more hours due to their obsessive tendencies.

I don't understand the need to be offended. It's not even as if playing chess is a glorious thing so saying that men are better than women in chess is not even a strike against women. If anything it means that men are simply more nerdy while women tend to not waste their time moving wooden pieces on a board.

The problem is, even the TOP women, who play chess for a living so have a high degree of incentive to play chess, do way way worse than top men with the same incentive. With the incentives kind of balanced, we see men performing better. This is proof that men simply are better in chess, which may not even be a good thing

In general, women tend to stay around average intelligence and men gravitate to either very intelligent, or very....not.

It's hard to place the women who actively play chess because they are part of the outliers to begin, since its generally not interesting to women. So comparing men and chess to women also depends on on the individuals interested in chess to begin with.

That's not what the data I've seen indicates.

Look, I'm open to changing my mind, I really am. In the last BLM discussion someone private messaged me, and we chatted about some data, and I came around to his side. (God forbid we bring that topic up here).

I did google around to try and find the graphs I was talking about, which were posted on the forums... unfortunately, this topic has only been done about 1000 times, so it's a very hard forum to find via google (it's also more than 5 years old).

Sure, I can agree with all that.

Although I want to point out that most men find chess boring too. All chess players are outliers in that sense

If ur admitting that there's an "outlier" that only exists for men seemingly, its ur responsibility to show that there is no difference between men and women when it comes to chess capabilities. 

look the fact that at the amateur level women and men have no rating discrepancies is irrelevant. I see this as the main argument all the time. i cant fathom why u make it. Anyone can play at the amateur level, its not difficult. It's the same with most other sports. What u need to look at is the highest level of the sport.

Who dominates the highest level of chess? men. OVERWHELMINGLY men. 

If u want to make the case that men and women have no differences in capability, then prove it. by playing chess. not u specifically, but women them selves. stop making this insane argument and actually back it up over the board. 

Yes there is no data because it is impossible to see how much time one has spent on chess. That's why we look at the "TOP LEVEL" because there the time spent or atleast the motivations are somewhat balanced out.

For example, it's impossible to say whether a guy A has spent more time than a girl B in chess or not but it's very obviously the case that both kasparov and judit have spent huge amounts of time on chess. How much? we don't know but they both study chess with a passion because it used to be their main job.  We can safely say that both have spent thousands upon thousands of hours. Kasparov being infinitely better than judit then begs the question, why isn't judit as good as kasparov when she also studied with the same intensity or atleast close to the same intensity?

That's why we look at the top level because we want incentives to be equal. If both A and B have the same incentive to do something and that incentive is their survival(playing chess as their only job) then we get a good balanced plain to measure their skill because we can assume the time spent studying chess by both players is enough that we can compare them purely based on skill

I agree, pointing at amateurs is totally irrelevant.

But pointing at a large population of amateurs can actually make a good argument, because if they're all about at the same level, then it means it took about the same effort to get there. Otherwise you'd have to say all the females who play chess worked harder to get there, and they just so happen to have lined up with where the males are.

As to your point about working hard, it's sort of depressing (for me at least) to find out that most people who become GMs did it in ~8 years or less. No one improves for 20 years. You either get there quickly or you don't get there at all. Which means outliers (like 2700 players) very heavily depend on the individual's genetics. In other words you can't say "a lot of women play, so show me the champion" because again rarity depends on the size of the population you're drawing from.

---

I also agree my pointing to as-of-yet unproduced graphs is really silly. If the data exists then at some point I should stop talking about it and just show it... but this is still the argument I want to make i.e. that men are only 200 points stronger at the elite level.

That's why you look at a large number of players. If you have a group of 1 million people, sure some work super hard, and some are lazy, but it all averages out to where any group of 1 million will be about as hard working as any other group of 1 million.

(not that there are 1 million FIDE players... actually I don't know the population size)

     Let's admit that chess is a game played primarily by nerds. Nerdy young guys get together in math clubs, science clubs, chess clubs, and other similar environments. Most are uncomfortable around the opposite sex. Probably Freud would have said something about sublimating their sex drive into achieving success at chess. This is not an environment a lot of girls would wish to enter, and if the do they they are uncomfortable and unwelcome if they do. And (sexist comment alert!) they don't find the chess nerds attractive and do not enjoy the boys' attentions. Also, in past eras (and a lot of today's societies) women were simply not permitted to engage in such activities. So there have always been fewer female chess players, hence girls who might be interested don't have friends who play chess, don't get encouraged to go play chess, don't get supported when they do play chess. Less women in chess in the past, less encouragement to women in the present, less enjoyment in chess circles. Why wonder that less women get into chess. Incidentally, abilities have little to do with it--if men only played chess because they are good at it, the pool of chess players would be only 5% its present size.

It's not relevant even if the sample size of the amateurs is big because to be an amateur doesn't require u to become a master at the discipline. Being an amateur player isn't an achievement, women don't work harder for it, it's just a stage in chess u get to (1100-1500) just from playing chess. That's why it's not relevant. If you look at sports like football, where in the amateur level, schoolboys far surpass school girls, then it's relevant there if girls were performing as well, but in chess it's not relevant. that same dynamic for amateurs doesn't exist. 

As for the genetics thing, isn't it bizarre that the only people "gifted" with the genetics to be 2700 are men? You can't make the argument from the "pool size" because so many women play chess now, surely even 1 of them, like Polgar would be gifted? Nope, none, 0. 

This ties in to ur admittance of lack of evidence. U have no evidence, yet u make an outlandish claim like saying women are indeed equal to men in chess capability when reality so far has demonstrated that to be so false a child could understand.

*Sips tea* 🍵

Well, I think we found some common ground then. Because if the argument is something like females are inherently inferior when it comes to the elite levels of chess, then that's something that seems to be true to some extent or another, because I've also seen data that says participations rates don't fully explain that. I don't think it's 200 points, but maybe something like 50 points? I don't know.

But again, you can't say "so many women play, so there should be a 2700 right now" because rarity is well defined mathematically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rule

A six sigma event (six sigma meaning a certain distance away from average) is literally:

So if we have 500 million men playing, and 1 million women (just an example) we should expect a lot more rare individuals in the 500 million population.

im asking for one. there isn't even ONE. 

Not a single female chess player right now that is apparently as "gifted" as all the men at the top. Hou Yifan has been rated above 2600, she's faced Magnus, gotten completely annihilated almost every time. 

And as icky as it sounds to say one gender is definitely worse than another at _____

I mean, just look at the brains... they're different. Obviously men and women are different. It's impossible that we're equally good at chess.

Hey, maybe women are better than men at chess? Who knows. Let's get millions of them to play and find out...

... in any case, I don't think the data supports the idea that women are 200 points worse on average, or 200 points worse at the elite level.

That's not how rarity works

Let's say there's a deck of cards 1000 cards large (1000 unique cards)

If I give you 10 attempts to pull the one I'm thinking of, and I give someone else 100 attempts, which of you is more likely to pull the one card?

So you go around to little baby boys and little baby girls, and you pick one and force them to study chess, it's probably going be pretty average. But if you get to pick 100,000 babies and I only get to pick 1,000 then your best student is almost certainly going to be better (much better) than my best student.

U don't seem to understand. Im saying that "best student" from "1000 picks" isn't even comparable to the "best student from 100,000" picks. The difference is so large u can't put it up to lack of a pool size. 

Of course I understand mathematics and how chance works. If you have a much larger pool of humans to utilize you will find better players, but my point is even from that smaller pool, which lets admit isn't that small considering millions upon millions of women are playing chess, and HAVE, been playing chess for a couple decades now, not a single one is even CLOSE. The only one u could say is Judit Polgar, and even she was questionable as mentioned earlier. 

That's the point. i'm not seeing the "genetics" as you will..

Well that would be a cool experiment. We could take 1000 baby boys and 1000 baby girls and send them to chess camp and then see where they end up 20 years later... who wants to donate half a billion dollars and 2000 babies to me, lol