Why do we have woman categories?

I fully respect your point of wiew too. A difference is not proven but possible,time will tell. And i also apologize for "coming out strong" in some posts. 

Fide archive goes back to 2000 at least. Comparing the top ten players might be the way to go. 

Before starting, one thing to remember. I'm sure i have read somewhere that during a recent chess olympiad FIDE decided to gift all participating female players 50 elo points. As you certainly understand this idiotic action didn't do any good to the benefited players, which lost the unfairly gained points simply by performing as usual in the following games against male players. Howewer when looking at the rating list published immediately after that olympiad you will find inflated female ratings. This will probably appear as a peak in the graph. Better to exclude that list.

EDIT: this actually happened in 1986, ealier than i remembered.  +100 points to all female players except Susan Polgar. This decision was greatly criticized by both male and female players. Starting from 2000 or 2002 should be enough to make this irrelevant.

Do you know where I can find this archive? The limited archive I was talking about is located here. I can see no links to any archive going further back.

Meanwhile, I did download the May 2011 and January 2009 lists, and I processed them like I did here. Although these two measurement points are not enough to form more than a suggestion, there were two things that immediately jumped at me:

- The average rating for both males and females is decreasing. This is not very surprising; it's probably due to an increase in the popularity of registering a FIDE rating below 2000.

- The gender performance gap has notably increased from Jan '09 (67 pts.) to May '11 (97 pts.). This may be a fluke, and I'll have to go through the whole two years to see if there's an actual trend. If there is, then there may be nothing to prove by going back further in time: a difference of this magnitude in so short a time must also have something to do with the change in registration habits - e.g. in the mediocre categories, more women are registering with FIDE than men. This means that the effect of this registration surge is going to drown out any lessening of the gender gap through increased female performance.

Keep in mind that there is an artefact in the statistics at around 2000 points, as I explain in the thread to which I linked. This probably affects the reliability of the results, but it's difficult to say how much.

http://ratings.fide.com/toplist.phtml it goes back to 2000.

2 days ago i started creating the graph myself (average of top 10 male and female players)

April 2000  F2536 M2751

April 2002 F2523 M 2749

April 2004 F2527

April 2006 F2530

April 2008 F2560

May 2010 F2566

May2011  F2573

And at this point i got tiret and stopped calculating. This can save some of your work i hope.

Unfortunately, those are only the top 100 lists (top 50 for women before July 2008). I processed the data for the entire player base, so I can't use those lists in the same way. Some things can of course be deduced from that data as well, but different approaches always have different implications. I feel that using the entire base gives better insight into the potential of woman players: the gap in this case is only half that of the gap in the top 10 for both sexes, but even this gap persists. Now, if this gap were to become zero, then it might be justified to claim that any difference in the top 10 would be because of a difference in participation.

The average rating for the top 10 males in May 2011 is 2785.8, so the gap at this level persists at over 200 rating points: 215 in April 2000 and 212 in May 2011. A drop of three points is not statistically significant, since as you can see, the gap was 226 in April 2002. So, it can be said that no progress whatsoever has taken place in the last eleven years in this respect.

One thing to remember in that there is a rating inflaction currently going on. Inflaction should increase the existing gap beetween 2 players remaining equally strong. Instead, the difference m/f has remained fairly stable. This should count as a reduction of the effective gap in strenght. But this is probably not a very relevant effect. 

More important, 10 years is a very little period. most of the leading female players remained the same in the 2000-2010 period. We really need older data.

Well, it looks like the average rating gap is indeed on the rise:

This is obviously a result of the increase in registered ratings, but there are too many factors to consider to make any viable assessment. I would guess that this is what's happening: in the past, more casual male players have registered for a FIDE rating, and this has meant that the average male rating has been lower than the average female rating when corrected for "gender potential". Now that chess is becoming more popular among female players (is it?), more female players are registering at the mediocre level, where male players have already registered, and this brings down the average female rating compared to the male rating. But this would imply that there actually is an inherent difference in gender potential. It would certainly be interesting to see if the average rating gap would approach the 200-point gap of the top players, instead of the other way around. The way to contest this would be to take a hard look at whether there is a sufficient amount of statistics to analyze the data this way.

I would welcome other guesses that, if the data is to be trusted, would still allow the male and female chess potentials to be inherently similar. For example, one possibility would be an increase in participation in women-only events.

a graph based on 2 years seems just meaningless to me. In two years new players can't likely even reach their correct rating. 

"in the past, more casual male players have registered for a FIDE rating, and this has meant that the average male rating has been lower than the average female rating when corrected for "gender potential". Now that chess is becoming more popular among female players (is it?), more female players are registering at the mediocre level, where male players have already registered, and this brings down the average female rating compared to the male rating."

I don't get this. More registering female players=more female players at every level, not only at the lower end. The distribution should remain the same. But maybe yes, if you look at a 2 years period it's fully possible that those new players have not the time to develop to their real strenght.

Not at every level. Surely serious players register with FIDE a long time before they reach their full potential. There should thus be a greater influx of players at the lower levels, as new high-rated players come from within the pool of already registered players. This is compounded by the fact that players could not register a rating below 2000 until recently; this is clearly visible when comparing the distributions for May 2011 (in black) and January 2009 (in grey):

In this graph, the effect is more apparent with the male player base (top), but it's clearly noticeable in the female base (bottom) as well.

I concur that two years is too short a time to make any claims. However, the fact that the gap has increased at every measurement point does indicate some kind of change. It's the nature of this change that's the big question now.

Warning: The following is a bit emotional and may contain language not suitable for children. Viewer discretion is advised (I apologize).

It would just break my heart if hypothetically I made it to 2200 but was

overshadowed by some 2000 level female player (say instead of me getting in a given article, they put her in instead because it's "more interesting" or something). I hope that wouldn't happen, but since these days that's nearly good enough to get women an official title, I'm nervous. It's honestly disgusting to see 1700-1900 level female players being featured in magazines (chess life is the one I get, included in my USCF membership), because I know the same is not being done for males of that level with anywhere near the frequency.

But of course, it would be assumed that it's at least as hard for a woman to get to 2000 (you know, given her obviously horrible circumstances that we just know apply to every woman) as it is for me to get to 2200. Yeah, thanks a lot assholes. I'm sure they wouldn't even consider all the hard work I'd have to put in to get to 2200. It would in my opinion NOT be ok for me to get less attention than those 2000 players, male or female: quite frankly, I showed more ability, and had to work harder. To praise this is much more of a priority than to praise one's gender.

This is disrespect to the highest degree; it is Un-ac-cep-ta-ble. I have been saying this the whole time, but I think with this perspective this may affect me one day.

And I'll say again: Anna Zatonskih's husband is a grandmaster I believe, who is probably stronger than her, yet is hardly ever mentioned by name from what I've seen, at least not anymore. (???!!) POOR GUY -- they just don't give a shit about his achievements, do they? Not pretty enough? I mean, I don't know if he's currently active in American chess, but in any event it seems odd that he is so incidentally overlooked when he is the stronger of the couple! Instead, it's more like "So, Anna, does your husband know how to play?" "Well, yeah, but he's only a grandmaster."; he's totally overshadowed.

"That's probably because Anna is at the top of her division and the other guy isn't???"

In any case, nobody bothers to recognize him, and quite unethically so if you ask me. You're saying it's more important to just be at the top of your divison than to actually play great chess? It just seems so ironic that a stronger chess player is pretended not to exist, that's all.

I guess this is just what society thinks. What can you do.

"This is starting to sound a little weird man...."

Probably because I'm one of the few that actually recognize this sexism and whine about it? I apologize but the lack of respect for good chess, demonstrated by lower rated and less working females overshadowing stronger and harder working males, is unbearable.

He's better than her by 100 points; that's quite enough: those 100 points could represent hundreds of hours of more hard work for one thing.

But again, people don't care about that.

 I wouldn't say THOUSANDS. I think there are around 1,200 or so.

"There are thousands of GMs out there. How do you expect all of them to get recognition until they do something of the calibur she did?"

Well, ideally, attention should be proportional to rating, but I know it's much more complicated than that. Still, that is what we should strive for. Unfortunately this is nearly impossible, one of the big reasons being male and female segregation.

And what do you mean, "calibur of what she did?" They have demonstrated greater chess ability by maintaining a higher rating (for those rated higher than her)! That's better in my book, don't know about you.

 Not thousands of GMs. About 1,200 or so.

First off -- how does my post not make sense? Indeed, in every case, I think it's more admirable chess-wise to be a 2600 player than a 2500 player, no matter how many titles either has. I've got lots of crappy chess trophies (well, actually... they are pretty nice -- but meaningless!) for winning tiny tournaments in low sections; 2000 players just have some extra money; but their achievement -- getting to 2000 -- is better than anything I have ever done in chess.

But by your logic, you're saying my achievement is more meaningful because I was the best among little kids (logic: being "best in your division"), whereas that 2000 player might be in a group with lots of masters and so doesn't win that much.

Second, your example is not very good because those circumstances could not be any less related to what I am talking about, i.e., back then there were no female titles, so obviously there's no sexism there, at least against males. I don't see how that in any way justifies or applies to what is going on now.

No; I'm saying that it is an injustice and that there should be efforts taken against it: getting rid of female titles.

"The reference to sexism would be humor...."

Great, but that wouldn't clear anything up discussion wise.

Well, what I have been talking about all along, of course: Taking away female titles will make things more objective, helping this particular issue.

Do you disagree? And I don't mean whether or not female titles are good or not; I mean do you agree that one good result of abolishing them would be this greater objectivity?

And I really don't see why you need to exaggerate with all the dots. Why not just be respectful, man? Seriously.

That a less-skilled female gets more accolades than higher rated males is the showbiz aspect of chess, so to speak.

The same way the best female basketball player can't earn a spot on the floor in the NBA yet be far better known than most of those players whose jocks she can't even wash.

I don't see any injustice though.

People accept the marketing. That's showbiz.

People accept it, but I for one don't. It's unfortunate. For them mostly.

Well, if female titles didn't exist, the situation with Zatonskih compared to her husband would be different, wouldn't it? I would assume he would get more recognition because he'd then be more likely to be successful. So in this case it would be based more on chess strength, even though he's a man and she's a woman, thus representing some improved objectivity, don't you think?

"I'm sorry man but you lost me at the "let's recognize hundreds of random people we don't even know" part."

Could you point out that part for me? I don't know why you think I believe I can solve all the problems in the chess world; I am arguing one thing and one thing only in that I think separate titles are wrong.

See, it's a problem when you take everything I say and subjectively interpret it: I end up being made out to say things I never said or meant. Only assume what I more or less directly say.