Why are men better than women at chess?
This is the question that Carole Hooven, author of the excellent book Testosterone: The Story of the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, takes up in a new article in Quillette. What I like about the article is that it appears to consider every available hypothesis, and uses a scientific approach to finding evidence that either supports or weakens many of them. She tentatively settles on one that may be evolutionary in its origin, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Click below to read:
I believe Hooven got interested in the question when FIDE, the international chess federation, recently decided that transwomen would not be permitted to compete in their official chess events that were limited to natal women. Since transwomen are natal men, this implies that there is some advantage in being a natal man when it comes to winning at chess. Of course this move by FIDE could be considered transphobic, as it already has been, but in fact the evidence is that, regardless of cause, men are much better than women at chess.
How do we know this? Because, although some chess tournaments are limited to people of one sex, there are also mixed-sex tournaments in which women play against men. And those show a result similar to that in tennis: rankings based on those tournaments show that the top women chess player would probably rank below the top 200 or 300 men.
But why is this? After all, in tennis and other sports, men outdo women because there is an inherent athletic advantage associated with the male body: more muscles, higher bone density, greater grip strength, and so on. These advantages become prominent at puberty because they’re associated with the higher testosterone of males. (This does not mean, of course, that no woman can ever beat a man in mixed-sex sports; it is a difference, and a big one, in averge performance.) Likewise, transwomen, biological men who assume the identity of a woman, also retain these athletic advantages over natal women, especially when they transition after puberty. That’s why several sports associations have banned transwomen from women’s athletics.
But chess? None of the athletic advantages I mentioned should obtain for chess, which involves only moving light pieces of wood or plastic around a board. So why are men so much better at playing chess?
Hooven lists a number of hypotheses, which I’ve divided into the following categories in bold (my words). Carole’s text is indented.
a.) More males take up chess in the first place. If this is the case, then regardless of average performance, the top players will be weighted with more men, simply because even if the average performance is the same, a bigger curve for men (frequency versus score) means that the upper tails of high performance will contain more men. This will be the case regardless of the variation in performance itself, and simply reflects the fact that at every performance level, there will be more men than women.
This is a reasonable hypothesis, but one Hooven thinks is weak because of Scrabble and bridge, which more women than men take up but ultimately the championships are heavily dominated by men:
In a game of Scrabble, as most readers will know, two competing players earn points for creating words using one or more of the seven lettered tiles in their inventory, which they place on a grid-spaced board. Like chess, Scrabble uses a version of the Elo rating system. But unlike in the chess world, women dominate the recreational ranks of Scrabble, accounting for about 85 percent of all recreational players. Even at the competitive level, women generally outnumber men (which isn’t that surprising given that Scrabble is all about words, and verbal ability is one area in which women tend to outperform men). So if the participation-rate hypothesis were correct in this context, then women should be dominating the elite Scrabble ranks.
But they’re not. Instead, men dominate Scrabble’s upper tiers, as they do in chess. And the same goes for Bridge, another game that’s dominated at the recreational level by women.
Scrabble tournaments usually feature separate divisions, which are classified according to Elo ratings. Players with the highest ratings compete in the first division, in which there are few women. As the skill level goes down, the proportion of women increases, until you get to the lowest level, where women vastly outnumber men. No woman has ever won a national or World Scrabble Championship. (However, just last year, Ruth Li from Toronto did win the North American Championship in the High School division, becoming the first female to ever win any such regional championship.)
Of course, Scrabble and chess are different games that require different skills, and lessons from the former may not cleanly translate to the latter. But even if one confines one’s focus to chess, the participation-rate thesis doesn’t present a convincing explanation for the observed sex differences in performance.
In addition, over the last few years women’s participation in chess has increased substantially, but the average gap between men and women hasn’t narrowed much, though it has a bit in some places. Overall, though, this hypothesis seems weak.
Second, over the last 50 years or so, female participation in chess has increased measurably around the world—a fact that should, according to the participation-rate hypothesis, lead to a narrowing of the sex gap at the highest levels of play. And in a few cases, that has happened. In France, for example, the female participation rate increased from 6 percent to 15 percent from 1985 to 2015, and the sex gap in ratings also significantly narrowed. But overall, the evidence is mixed. In the mid-1940s, the Elo difference between the world’s highest-rated male and female chess players hovered around 150 points. Eighty years later, that figure hasn’t really changed. (Note that such comparisons are based in part on retrospectively calculated Elo ratings, as FIDE didn’t start using them until the late 1960s.)
b.) Sexism: women are driven out of chess or don’t take it up because of misogyny in the game. Sexism can manifest itself in many ways: simple harassment of women (which is reported), not taking women seriously, which can lead to a lack of self-confidence, lowered expectations, and a higher dropout rate. This should be mitigated to some degree by the existence of all-women’s leagues and tournaments. But Hooven doesn’t think that this is an important hypothesis because reduced sexism over time hasn’t narrowed the performance gap:
Such reports [of sexism] should, of course, be taken seriously. But I’m far from convinced that sexism and harassment are the main reasons why men outperform women at chess. We’ve already come a long way in battling sexism during my lifetime. And yet, even as women have made great strides in such areas as medicine, law, engineering, and academia, the sex gap in chess has barely budged since second-wave feminism took off in the 1960s. This all suggests there’s something else going on.
c.) Men and women have the same average performance, but men have greater variance, manifested as relatively more players in both the highest and lowest tails of the performance distribution. Hooven calls this the “greater male variability”, or GMV, hypothesis. The variability can involve many traits possibly involved in chess success: spatial ability, drive to win, willingness to practice, and so on. The key here is that there need be no average difference between men and women, but still the greater variation of men ensures that in the upper tails, where the champions reside, will be mostly populated by men. (The hypothesis can still hold even if there are some differences in means.) GMV may be the case for intelligence, as the average performance of men and women on IQ-related tests are about the same, but men are more variable. But again, this doesn’t seem to be telling for chess, though it could be important in STEM fields:
The GMV hypothesis is the explanation often given for sex differences in STEM fields, particularly the “hard” sciences such as physics. The idea is that even if there’s no male-female difference in average math or physics ability, there would still be more men at the very high (and low) end of the ability spectrum. These are the extreme outliers who are most likely to earn prestigious faculty positions, file many patent applications, and win career achievement awards. And there is, in fact, strong evidence supporting the hypothesis; many traits do tend to be more variable in men than in women.
But if the greater male variability hypothesis explained the male advantage in chess, then we should observe that Elo ratings [these are measures of chess proficiency involving games won as well as the quality of the opponent] for males would be more variable than those for females. That is, we would expect more male grandmasters not because males are better at chess, but simply because there would be fewer females at both the high and low end of performance.
But in most populations of chess players, that statistical pattern isn’t reflected in the distributions of Elo ratings. Those for males are not more variable than for females. In many cases, in fact, the variability among female ratings is actually higher.
d.) Males are innately better in traits that lead to success in chess. These involve average differences in traits and not just variances, and could include spatial ability, degree of aggression, drive to win, other aspects of cognitive ability, dedication to the sport so that one practices a lot more, and so on. Note that “innately” implies the differences don’t result from socialization or sexism, but are the same kind of differences that gives men advantages in “regular” sports. Of course these innate differences could interact with other factors, as the phenotype here (chess performance) always involves an interaction between genes and one’s environment.
Ultimately, Hooven considers this the best explanation because there is independent evidence that men excel in the kind of motivation, competitiveness, and “obsessive passion” that leads to monomaniacal focus not just on winning, but on practicing:
A more promising explanation for male dominance in elite chess involves motivation. A large body of research strongly suggests that the sexes differ in their preferences for competition. As both Kasparov and Repková have intuited, men are simply more competitive—that is, they have a stronger motivation not just to compete, but to win, in formal physical and non-physical competitions of all kinds.
Men are more likely to choose games that involve direct, one-on-one competition, in which the result is a clear winner and loser—such as chess. Women are less competitive even when interacting anonymously—for example, in online arenas such as massive multiplayer role-playing games. This applies even when players interact using avatars of the sex opposite to their own; situations in which social expectations and stereotypes should have a reduced influence on in-game behavior. Women’s performance and enjoyment tends to suffer when the competition intensifies; that is, when the stakes are highest or time pressure is applied. For example, the average male-female sex difference in “blitz” chess games, which allocate ten minutes or less for each player to make all of their moves, is greater than that observed in standard chess, in which each player has at least an hour and a half. Moreover, relative to men, in experimental and real-life conditions, women tend to opt out of tournament conditions.
So it’s not surprising that females, being less focused (on average, as usual) on crushing an opponent in some future tournament, might be less motivated to go in for the kind of hardcore practice that’s necessary to develop elite skills (“deliberate practice,” as it’s called, as distinct from simply practising by playing).
. . . . If your instinct tells you that males will be disproportionately drawn toward this kind of intense practice style than females, you’re correct. Studies show that boys and men are more likely to exhibit a “rigid persistence in an activity,” by which “the passion controls the individual” (“obsessive passion” in the literature). In anecdotal terms, we are talking here about the man who drops everything to become, say, a 16-hour-per-day videogamer, or a day-trader, or chess addict. Yes, some women take on these kinds of fixations. But men do it more often, and with greater intensity.
It’s long been known that measures of risk-taking, competitiveness, persistence, and aggression are higher in men than women, so this may be a key factor in the explanation. But are these differences due to evolution or socialization? After all, men are expected to be aggressive and behaviorally conform to a “male stereotype”. On the other hand, that stereotype itself could reflect behavior instilled by natural selection more in one sex than another, so it’s seen as the norm.
Hooven comes down on the evolution side, and I pretty much agree with her given these arguments as well as others (e.g., socialization should differ among human societies but the average behaviors don’t; our closest primate relatives, who aren’t socialized, show similar difference in aggression and competition, there are biological reasons to expect higher competition in males, and these traits begin to manifest themselves at a young age, presumably before much socialization can take place). Luana Maroja and I discuss similar sex differences in behavior (and their possible evolutionary roots) in our Skeptical Inquirer paper on ideology and biology.
Hooven:
That said, I don’t see evidence for the idea that socialization alone explains the stronger male tendency to focus obsessively on doing whatever is necessary to win, even at board games. And there are good reasons to think that this tendency has an evolutionary basis: In the animal kingdom, males tend to devote more time, energy, and risk to status competition, since this tends to pay more reproductive benefits for males than females. So it’s not unreasonable to suspect that boys and men have some kind of biological advantage—possibly underpinned by higher lifetime exposure to testosterone—that helps explain their over-representation in tournament-level competition in general. (While this particular brand of competitiveness may have a strong evolutionary explanation, it is unlikely to be the wisest reproductive strategy in today’s world.)
If this is the case, what about FIDE’s decision to ban transwomen from their women’s chess tournaments? (Some countries, including England, Germany, France, and the United States, don’t uphold this ban in their national tournaments.) In the end, since Hooven concludes that biological factors play a key role in men’s dominance in chess, for the time being FIDE’s ban makes sense:
Ultimately, sex differences in complex behaviors and skills are always a product of interactions between biology on the one hand (that is, our genes and their relatively fixed effects, such as hormone levels and body size) and our environment on the other (that is, factors such as our family circumstances, social dynamics, and cultural norms). Interactions between the two shape not only our skills and abilities, but also any emerging group differences. But none such complicating factors change the fact that the sex gap in chess is real and persistent. Given the circumstances that led to the creation of the female category, and the fact that many girls and women appreciate what this category offers, FIDE is correct to take the steps necessary to protect its integrity.
Of course the data we really need are the chess performance of transwomen playing against biological women, and as far as I know we don’t have that kind of data.
****************
A coda: Perhaps the thinnest book I own is called “Jewish Sports Heroes”, given to me by a Jewish relative. It’s thin because Jews are not usually among the best baseball, soccer, football, or basketball champions we can think of (Sandy Koufax is a notable exception). I’m not going to hypothesize about this religious lacuna, but what amuses me is that the last chapter in the book, and the longest one, is on chess, as Jews have always excelled in chess. If the writers wanted to produce a book of reasonable length then, they simply had to add chess as a “sport” coequal with sports like football and basketball.
Interesting, thanks – I’ll try to read Hooven’s piece when I get some peace and quiet.
“Of course the data we really need are the chess performance of transwomen playing against biological women, and as far as I know we don’t have that kind of data.”
Because nobody actually cares?
If we’re addressing the question of whether trans-identified males should play chess in the same leagues as other males or in the special leagues set aside for women, it matters — so people would care. I would think some data of transwomen vs worn would come out of looking at what happens in those second leagues which have decided to be “inclusive.”
No, clearly somebody cares: the transwomen who are calling FIDE transphobic because they’ve banned transwome from playing against natal women in their tournaments.
Thanks for the insult, by the way. I see by looking through all your 17 comments that they have insulted various readers, also me again, and have in general been hostile, uncivil, and have added nothing to the discourse on this site. I urge you find another site to comment on.
I care. I play chess, and I’ve tried to get my daughter and nieces to play. All bright girls, all showed some aptitude for the game, but ultimately they were not interested in pursuing it seriously. Moving little pieces around a board doesn’t seem to appeal to nearly as many women as men, and I’m glad this article explores why. Among chess circles everybody knows about the gender gap, and truth be told, many believe that men have some inherent mental advantage, even if they don’t say it out loud. I’m glad an article like this basically debunks that, but does introduce plausible alternatives that aren’t completely down to sexism and negative socialization of girls (which is still a factor).
This is indeed interesting. Perhaps it fits with the apparent paradox that women in more gender-UNequal societies (Turkey, Algeria) tend to choose STEM careers at higher rates than those in more gender-equal societies (Finland, Norway). Perhaps when women truly have the freedom to choose, they act on their innate preference for less intensely competitive endeavors.https://www.stevestewartwilliams.com/p/the-gender-equality-paradox-in-stem
Have you seen Susan Pinker’s book about this effect, ‘the Sexual Paradox’? She’s the psychologist sister of Steven Pinker.
The case of the Polgar sisters is intriguing. Their father, a chess grandmaster [ and Jewish ] creating an educational experiment out of his daughters, hypothesising that exceptional achievement is made from environmental circumstances.
Overall Hooven’s article is good, but on the “greater male variability” hypothesis I find her rebuttal unconvincing:
The GMV hypothesis is that the distribution of IQ (and related skills needed for chess) is broader. That is, there would be more males above an IQ of 130 and also more males below an IQ of 70.
Hooven rebuts this by saying that there are not more weak male players. But people with IQ below 70 don’t play chess! More or less everyone who plays chess to the extent of getting an Elo rating would be of above-average intelligence, likely well above average. So if you look at stats of Elo ratings you’re only looking at the high-end tail.
I think that Hooven is entirely right that a big part of the explanation is that single-minded focus and willingness to dedicate endless hours to studying a game, purely to be better at it than others, is a male trait.
But even so, I also think that the GMV hypothesis is likely right, and if we’re talking about the rather esoteric skills needed for chess, at the high-end tail, including the ability to visualise and calculate the next 6 or 7 moves, more males have that ability.
“But if the greater male variability hypothesis explained the male advantage in chess, then we should observe that Elo ratings [these are measures of chess proficiency involving games won as well as the quality of the opponent] for males would be more variable than those for females.”
I also came here in the comment section to point out what Coen said. Chess-players are a selected subset of the population and people who are not good at chess do not play it professionally/competitively. So in fact I would not expect to see the lower part of that higher variability among male chess players.
Good point. You’d need a random set of people to correctly compare but as you say, chess players are far from random.
I came here to make the same comment too.
I also think she is self-refuting in this regard, as the hypothesis she ultimately endorses works in the same way (greater variance in motivation).
Read the piece elsewhere, and was struck by how shallow this comment on “GMV” was.
> entirely right that a big part of the explanation is that single-minded focus and willingness to dedicate endless hours to studying a game
This, too, might be influenced by GMV. We are again observing only the right tail of single-minded focus.
A dialectical view :
Remember also, dialectic is a thought-process running simultaneously in parallel with the more rational thinking (as demonstrated here). Dialectic uses what is true as starting material to reify an imaginary requirement for the End of History to come true.
So here, rampant possession of society by the demons of sexism – in the past, rippling into the present, and future – are necessary to dialectically synthesize the contradiction-free End of History as conceived in Hegelian formulation. Anything those problematics are attached to, too – and seek to transform the target of chess in the process.
Faith in dialectic is the core belief of a religious cult.
Chess, though, is awesome! Awesome non-dialectical pieces, both… 🙂
Look, forget the explanations. The best way to approach the supremicist, neo-colonialist, cis-normative and patriarchal disparity between men and women in chess is to drop the whole ranking system. It’s elitist and fails to account for the lived experience and internal self-knowledge of the marginalized. And what’s the distinction between “winning” and “losing?” It’s a confused, many-faceted spectrum incapable of being objectively defined. A GrandMASTER??? Racist.
No more ranks. Those who object will automatically be removed from the game.
Checkmate.
I entirely agree. And have you noticed that chess is so white-supremacist that — I can hardly type this without shaking — white always gets the first move!. This built-in systemic racism ensures that many more games are won by the white pieces!
And don’t forget the double entendre … white on right. And the queen goes on its own colour.
Many ways to improve chess. Just one suggestion: change the rules to allow pawns the same moves as queens. Add pieces with ambiguous gender. There’s just no limit!
This ^^^ whole train of thought is scaring the passant out of me
Non-binary pieces would be fun. Just when you thought you were about to checkmate, the King self-identifies as a Queen and assassinates the pesky attacking piece from across the board.
I don’t play chess, but I love the comments. Has no woke activist ever taken on this clear problem before? Yes, the King Should be allowed to identify as a Queen. But only as a Black Queen.
The overall effect of men’s dominance at elite levels of chess is likely a combination of the factors discussed.
The impact of the parameters of a normal distribution on integrated populations at the tail end is generally under-appreciated. Small changes in the mean µ and standard deviation σ of a bell curve affect the tail population in literally exponential manner. Differences in participation rates enter as overall scale N, which “merely” changes tail populations in linear proportions.
Without promoting any particular cause it’s possible that ‘average skills’ can be very close to identical – any difference could be lost in noisy data.
However a very modest, almost undetectable difference, could widen the gap between natal and practised skill if the skill was exercised every day, and tested regularly in tournaments.
gutta cavat lapidem [non vi sed saepe cadendo]
~ a water drop hollows a stone [not by force, but by falling often]
On the topic of “Jewish Sports Heroes,” see “When Jews Dominated Professional Basketball.”
https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/11/25/when-jews-dominated-professional-basketball/
Wasn’t it Micky Mantle who said, “I’m not an athlete, I’m a baseball player?”
Jane Leavy’s biography of the great “Left hand of God” Sandy Koufax is excellent!
And, I think that Hooven’s analysis (which I read in its entirety) is entirely plausible. She may not have ruled out other explanations, but male competitiveness (and in some cases literally to-the-death tenacity in competing) is known across the animal kingdom and has a solid basis in evolutionary theory. I would (provisionally) wager that Hooven has it right.
One aspect mentioned in her article, but not emphasized enough in my opinion, is trait differences in spatial abilities between the sexes. I do play myself and have a strong rating (approx 2400-2500 or there about), but am completely amazed at how the very elite male players can recall board patterns from dozens of other games they have studied or played. Further, the extreme end I witnessed: one GM playing blindfolded against 5 different other players, beating them all. Keeping 5 live games in your head simultaneously is a feat which I believe highlights why men dominate in this sport (along with single mindedness, competition, etc)
While the record for blindfold play has always been held by men, I don’t see any reason why a female GM wouldn’t be able to handle 5-10 blindfold games. In other words, nowhere have I seen that memory (unless there is such a thing as “spatial memory”) has been listed as a factor as to why men dominate chess.
In other words, a male player rated 2500 (approximately grandmaster strength) and a female player rated 2500 should have the same set of chess skills and abilities.
Speaking of which, with all due respect, your rating is almost certainly nowhere near 2400-2500. Perhaps you have achieved this score as a puzzle rating on chess.com or Lichess, but someone rated that high is of International Master (IM) or Grandmaster (GM) strength. I’ve been a National Master (USCF rating of 2200 or above) since 1986, and there is a big difference between the various online ratings and what is called over the board (OTB) chess.
Why couldn’t elissa be an IM or around that level?
See elissa’s reply below, which confirms my hunch. I based my guess on the way elissa’s reply was worded; had they been an IM-level player, it would have sounded different. An player with an established rating would not say “approx 2400-2500 or there about.”
That being said, approaching a 2400 rating at blitz chess on Lichess is really very good and is nothing to sneeze at.
I’m glad that Elissa commented below. But, Coel, the probability alone suggests that she wasn’t. There are fewer than 50 women worldwide with FIDE ratings in classical chess above 2400 and only a dozen with 2500+. When you consider rapid, there are fewer than two dozen rated as high as 2400, (only four above 2500) and in blitz it is barely a dozen as high as 2400 (with only two over 2500). I would also be surprised if any of those women did not know precisely what her rating was in each category.
Disclosure: I am nowhere near 2400 officially, online, or in my dreams. But men and women, young and old, can still enjoy the game—even those of us who suck!
You are correct; my rating is an approximation only, garnered from Lichess play against their ratings. And to clarify further, it’s strictly on Blitz 3 minute games. I don’t have enough non-blitz games to estimate that rating.
As to the spatial abilities and memory – it is speculation on my part, but consider how AI can trounce any human player simply by looking at large data buckets (games), and weighting the next best move.
“spatial abilities”
Something that strikes me with chess is the sort of feeling when looking / scanning the board – something in the head – what is that? It’s like turning things over in the head, connected to eye movement. It is very clear with chess – but can apply for other things, like mathematics, sight-reading music, or even car repair or plumbing (IMHO).
That feeling seems to develop positively (?) with chess practice as well – i.e. the chess results get better.
Also congrats on that stellar score!
interesting. I find the advent of trans females entering the fray is also making for more contention. I recall reading something about Jews that bucks the norm. Obviously they dominate endeavors revolving around general intelligence. There are also some great Jewish athletes. But (if i recall correctly) there was a note that mentioned that overall coordination and intelligence parallel each other in most populations, except that of the Jewish one. I can’t think of any group quite as interesting as “da jews.” At least at the DNA and cultural level, they are standouts on so many levels.
Very interesting. I didn’t know about the greater variability phenomenon in men. I wonder what that is about. Why must the enhanced ability be balanced by reduced ability?
I posted the below data in January, so the numbers may have shifted a bit here and there, but I’m confident the pattern holds:
Among active players, Hou Yifan is the highest-ranked woman in the world in classical time controls; she ranks #127 in the open category. The #2 woman in the world in classical chess, Ju Wenjun, ranks #309 in the open category. The two women change positions in rapid chess, with Ju Wenjun ranking #1 and Hou Yifan #2. In that time control they rank #174 and #330, respectively, in the open category.
What is interesting to me is that not only do men dominate, they are even better relative to women when under games with intense time pressure. Pick your favorite explanation.
Rather than wading even deeper into the evolution vs sociology debate (a false dichotomy in many ways), I will add that I watched the American Cup tournament this week with great enthusiasm—particularly the women’s competition. There we saw Alice Lee, a 14-year-old from the Minneapolis area, defeat Irina Krush, an eight-time US Women’s Chess Championship winner. It was Lee’s first match and tournament victories over the 40-year-old Krush, who was herself once a child prodigy. Despite Krush’s long dominance of women’s chess in the United States, she ranks 1456 among all active players—men and women—globally.
Chess at the top levels is largely a function of prodigies. There seems to be a critical period in which one must begin and take large strides. Someone starting in their twenties will, it appears, rarely, if ever, make it to the top. I have heard top players say that anyone who begins as a teenager faces an insurmountable ceiling. Perhaps there are parallels to language learning. Maybe even music.
Your closing comment certainly agrees with my experiences with young, extremely gifted classical musicians. The ones I’ve known who’ve won national competitions started playing — seriously with long hours of practice — as young children. For the record, as teenage champions, they all seemed to truly love music, and also had full lives outside of music — with friends, doing sports, and yes, many were very good chess players.
Thanks for presenting and elaborating on what seems to be a well-reasoned article.
The “women in chess” question has been around as long as I have been playing competitively, since 1969. It seems to me that Reason #4 (motivation) figures most into the question of why there are more strong male players than female, although #1 (more boys than girls will take up the game) and #2 (sexism) also contribute to the overall dominance of males by either increasing the number of males or decreasing the number of females. It seems to me that #3 (greater variability) is rather unlikely to be much of a factor.
Note that sometimes this question gets framed as “will there ever be a female world champion?” Judit Polgar, the strongest female player of all time, was once rated in the top 10 of all players in the world. So of course this is possible, but would require something of a perfect storm to occur, as there are dozens of absolutely fantastic male players who have never become world champion. But if you review Polgar’s games, or listen to her commentate on chess action (not an oxymoron!) today, there’s no doubt that individual women can be just as strong as men.
What do you mean by “just as strong as men” there? Yes, individual women can be as strong as all but the very strongest of men. But, as you say, the strongest ever woman peaked at world number 8. There have been about 4 other women who peaked around world number 50, but hardly any others that have ever been in the world top 100 (whereas well over a thousand men have been in the world top 100 at some point). Doesn’t this make it hard to argue that the top women can be “just as strong” as the top men?
I didn’t argue that the top women en masse are as strong as the top men players. I wrote “there’s no doubt that individual women can be just as strong as men,” J. Polgar being the clearest example.
But how can your last sentence be true other than as aspirational? No individual woman has bested the best men.
Oops! My apologies! I totally misread that last sentence! So sorry. I think I saw a can’t where you wrote can.
As you were.
I can only speak for myself but I never liked the game of chess. I’m a woman who majored in a STEM field but I find chess and checkers too aggressive. I prefer games where you don’t take the other player’s pieces but compete passively, as in Chinese checkers.
When I would play cribbage or Chinese with a (female) friend, we would mostly be socializing.
Some of the chess champions like Bobby Fischer seem almost a bit autistic.
So personality would factor into who chooses to play chess.
I recently watched (and liked) the Netflix mini-series Queen’s Gambit which featured a woman protagonist chess prodigy (the lovely Anya Taylor-Joy) who kicks everyone’s chess-ass. I didn’t know about this large gap between the sexes in chess, but it makes me think the mini-series was a total fiction! I joke, I joke.
And joking aside, thanks for this fascinating post. I have to agree with the 4th reason as well, but her other arguments were well thought out and interesting nonetheless.
Jerry et al.
I am old enough to have become fascinated with chess because of Bobby Fischer who became World Champion in 1972. I have been studying and reading about the game since then and competed in the New Zealand championships several times, though not in the top league.
One interesting statistical study seemed to demonstrate that in international top-level chess women perform about as well as expected on the basis of numbers competing by comparison with men. I used to attend Wellington chess clubs regularly but dropped out because I found the social environment not to my taste – lots of teenage males sneering when they beat you and throwing tantrums when they lose.
Ever played in chess tournaments? I played in several but did not enjoy them. I remember one New Zealand championship played at a seaside high school over the summer vacation. Day after day I looked out the window at the beach and the waves and wondered why I was not out there with a nice girlfriend rather than sitting inside seven or eight hours each day, getting deflated when losing a game I should have won!
Think about the difference in psychology between a nurse or teacher who wants to benefit others, say, and a strongly-competitive individual. The ability or potential may be the same but the motivation quite different.
People such as Fischer, Kasparov and Carlsen were or are at the top. They have superb analytic skills, very fine strategic judgement, encyclopedic knowledge and enormous stamina. But that’s not enough. They are individualistic, are extremely competitive and have huge will to win. For many people living out of a suitcase in hotels, as Fischer did, or beating other people at anything, is simply not fulfilling.
My talent for chess was modest but I enjoy playing the computer (Stockfish) and playing through the games of Capablanca, Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov and Carlsen. Many of us opt out of the competitive scene when we finally realise that chess is not life.
David Lillis
A person who is 2% better than you will beat you most of the time…at least in my experience. After someone has learned some openings and got several hundreds of games under their belt, they have probably progressed to about 90% of their potential. At least for me, getting from a rating of 1400 to 1800 took about a year and was fairly pleasurable, but after that progress was extremely hard, and extremely not worth it.
In my post above I should have said:
“Many of us opt out of the competitive scene when we finally realise that chess is not life. Maybe girls realise it faster than guys!”
Perhaps females are mostly too sensible to devote an entire life to a game when the world provides so many other wonderful things – science, literature, the arts, music, hobbies, fulfilling careers, family and friends.
David Lillis
In the chess community it’s generally been accepted that the number of females in the elites is likely just down to the number of male/female players over all (#1). Statistically speaking evidence has been previously found consistent with this.
In addressing the evidence for this gap closing due to additional female participation it should be understood that every single one of the top players has been playing regularly for at least 10 years before they became strong enough to get into the elite. There will be a significant lag before changes to participation will filter up to the elite sections. Its also probably the case that these top players have got into the elite before the age of 20 and started playing at a young age, though increased female participation probably does reflect more girls starting playing rather than women.
Since previously trans-women have been allowed to compete in female competitions and since the other category is open (rather than male) then there is plenty of record of how the various categories perform against each other. There might be some difficulty identifying the trans players from the official FIDE ratings data however. I’m not sure what prompted the FIDE decision but it seems more socially motivated rather than necessary to promote fairness in competition.
Can’t resist posting this gag from Airplane
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2e5w4h
I think this comment about women in science by Philip Greenspun explains a lot:
Pursuing science as a career seems so irrational that one wonders why any young American would do it. Yet we do find some young Americans starting out in the sciences and they are mostly men. When the Larry Summers story first broke, I wrote in my Weblog:
A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job?
Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for men going into science is the following:
young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group
men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question “is this peer group worth impressing?”
Consider Albert Q. Mathnerd, a math undergrad at MIT (“Course 18” we call it). He works hard and beats his chest to demonstrate that he is the best math nerd at MIT. This is important to Albert because most of his friends are math majors and the rest of his friends are in wimpier departments, impressed that Albert has even taken on such demanding classes. Albert never reflects on the fact that the guy who was the best math undergrad at MIT 20 years ago is now an entry-level public school teacher in Nebraska, having failed to get tenure at a 2nd tier university. When Albert goes to graduate school to get his PhD, his choice will have the same logical foundation as John Hinckley’s attempt to impress Jodie Foster by shooting Ronald Reagan.
It is the guys with the poorest social skills who are least likely to talk to adults and find out what the salary and working conditions are like in different occupations. It is mostly guys with rather poor social skills whom one meets in the university science halls.
What about women? Don’t they want to impress their peers? Yes, but they are more discriminating about choosing those peers. I’ve taught a fair number of women students in electrical engineering and computer science classes over the years. I can give you a list of the ones who had the best heads on their shoulders and were the most thoughtful about planning out the rest of their lives. Their names are on files in my “medical school recommendations” directory.
https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
As someone who plays many competitive games, especially backgammon and pinball, and enjoys nature documentaries, I see a common thread in most male animals’ need to achieve to impress mates, and the human male’s drive to compete. But as alluded to in the article, women aren’t actually all that impressed by a man’s Elo rating.
I find this comment about competitiveness interesting :
“While this particular brand of competitiveness may have a strong evolutionary explanation, it is unlikely to be the wisest reproductive strategy in today’s world.”
Today’s world is young, humanly speaking and not guaranteeed to last as it is.