Women in chess?

Interesting topic. Nigel  Short the British Grand Master says it is due to differences between male and female brains. But I found a research paper and it says "there is no scientific evidence for sex specific intellectual performance differences", but rather differences in psychology or biochemistry/physiology may be an explanation. Here is the abstract if anyone is interested.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329887912_GENDER_DIFFERENCES_IN_CHESS_PERFORMANCE

 

And interestingly - goldenbeer was suggesting that women have better stamina, while the paper abstract suggests that females have a lower glycogen store and hence "burn out" faster with mental fatigue

Hi

Bye

Men and women are obviously different... but, honestly, not a whole bunch. There are a host of other POSSIBLE reasons:
1. Culture. Until recently, women were much less encouraged and or welcomed into the chess world.
2. Chess environment. Ties in with 1.
3. Outlook on life. Women’s bodies are more suited to care for children (at least very young children), while men’s tend to handle hard physical work better. Not to say you can’t ever switch it up, but those biological and hormonal features might give overall slightly different perspectives on life (not necessarily chess).

There’s more, but these are the most reasonable, and it’s likely a combination of all of these.

 

LOOOOOOOL!

Maybe women don’t typically play chess, because they are more intelligent than men and have more important things to do ...

Finally, what is intelligence? Intelligence is definitely not to be good in chess.

I’m surprised that so many people are saying that chess is male dominated because in my chess club at school it is made up of only girls so that surprised me a lot

Even when it's posible, It's way less probable.

This is the best analogy I've seen. Thank you! 

They arent lmao

Because women have a lot of cool things to do in life other than just spend their time playing

Chess kiss

Why would someone think that women shouldn’t play chess?

     Chess playing environments as we know them today (clubs, tournaments, schools, local casual chess hangouts) got started in 19th century Europe. Coffee houses, taverns, men's clubs and the like were the places chess players gathered. Women were not permitted in most of these places. As times changed, women who could attend if they wished would find it uncomfortable to be the only woman there, so chess continued to be almost exclusively male. Even 50 years ago (when I started playing) females were a rarity. Today (or a year back when over the board still existed) tournaments have a much greater % of females among the younger participants. The school chess program that occupied the space where my local weekly chess club met just before we started had a lot of girls enrolled. So hopefully a few years from now chess will no longer be considered (among younger generations) a male-dominated activity and more women will feel at ease, recruit their friends, teach their daughters, and this question will become moot.

If you need women around you to participate in an activity that shows your own prejudices and insecurities. 

By this logic male primary school teachers should all quit their jobs. 

 

That was a very rude question to ask on top of the ignorance. You could have checked this person for the world.

Lets face it- to be good at chess you need to be intelligent enough to understand the strategic complexity of the game, and males naturally gravitate to that as a result of superior neurology as well as higher competitive drive which comes from testosterone

I agree with this. But, there is still a great chance for women to get to grandmaster levels. But the difference in intelligence between men and women is more in varieties. There are lots more "geniuses" that are men but there are also a lot more men on the lower spectrum. Females are a lot closer to the middle although averaging they average about the same. Anyways, basically just saying for an average chess player to advanced it doesn't really matter the gender. Until you get up to the genius players. Of course, I haven't done much research into this so if I am wrong, please correct me! 

For the love of the gods,its a board game. Just play and have fun.Why is this even an issue? Oh yeah....because everything is an issue these days.

Because, generally speaking, women are too smart to waste their time on a silly board game. 

To provide a more nuanced answer, Simone De Beauvoir wrote that a woman is not born but created. Virginia Woolf wrote that to be an essayist, a woman needs money and a room of her own. Taken in conjunction, I wonder if social pressures placed on women but not men (higher likelihood of being victimized by domestic violence, motherhood, childcare, household expectations and cleaning, less income, etc.) don’t tax women in such a way that prevents them from reaching the upper echelon.

And to put a point on Woolf’s essay, chess requires a lot of study and mental exercise to be a master, let alone a grandmaster; if a woman has to work a forty hour job, clean the house, make dinner, put the kids to bed, do laundry, and maybe even deal with an abusive partner, she really doesn’t have the time or mental bandwidth to study the game. Meanwhile, grandmasters like Tal and Fischer could focus exclusively on chess while being too inept to open a bank account.