The major titles, tournaments, and ratings aren't gendered and haven't been for a long time. That said, it is still the case that today's active male players tend to be overwhelmingly better than active female players at chess, so separate tournaments and titles were specifically created just for women. No women are restricted from the "main" tournaments or the "main" titles, though. It is entirely possible for a woman to dethrone Magnus Carlsen as World Chess Champion -- it's just never happened before.
As for why this discrepancy exists, that's really a very different question, and it's one that I don't know the answer to. There are potentially many factors at play. It could be as innocent as there are many more male players than female, so the odds are much higher for super-high-skill players to emerge in the male population than the female population.
The first chapter of Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers has a plausible explanation... he gives an example of how successful hockey players are disproportionately born in the months of January, February, and March. To poorly summarize the explanation, it is that the kids who started out with a slight advantage (i.e., being slightly older and bigger than the other kids) have their advantages multiplied over time because they are singled out for extra training and opportunities for growth (all-star games, travel teams, etc). In the case of chess, it is possible that the initial slight advantage (being a boy) does not even exist, but is only perceived, but if boys receive more encouragement, training, and opportunities than girls, the end result could be the same.
>As for why this discrepancy exists, that's really a very different question, and it's one that I don't know the answer to.
That's caused by IQ distribution differences between males and females. On average men and women have an IQ of 100, but there are more men that are both smarter and dumber than women.
According to the article you linked, research findings, including those on variability between sexes, are all over the map. This does not at all seem like a convincing explanation to me.
It's generally accepted [0] that there's more variability in male IQ than in women (with the averages still being about the same). So the effect is that there are more extremely intelligent men in the world than women (and, conversely, there are more extremely dumb men than there are women).
Assuming IQ and chess ability are correlated, this would explain the lack of women at the top tiers of chess playing.
Physical sports have the added factor that men usually have a much easier time building and maintaining muscle mass than women, as well as usually being taller and so benefiting from more leverage with longer limbs.
I believe, but am not sure, that the tournament and ratings are both non-gendered. But one can look at the list of rated players and observe who the top rated woman is on that list.
They talk in the article about how she worked to get OUT of gendered tournaments. This one isn't gendered, but it seems that there's a ghettoization of women in chess that she's working against.
It's easy to look and say, that group is taller and has bigger muscles so that's an obvious advantage.
It's harder to see mental advantages. Statistically, men have better spatial reasoning and are possibly better at the kind of logic (and intuition) chess requires.
Or maybe it's environmental. One way or another, every single one of the top 100 chess players in the world are men.
There is alot we don't know about both general intelligence and what traits specifically makes a chess player good. Certain kinds of reasoning help, but so does the discipline to study and remember many different chess positions and then apply those to the situation at hand.
There's nothing in science that says women should be worse at it than men, or that there aren't enough good women who play chess, and could crack the top 100. We just don't know is the bottom line and anyone who says differently probably has an agenda.
Separate tournaments were added as way to get more women playing than anything else as the sport has alot of educational value even if it's not the only way to develop those same intellectual "muscles". Hopefully, it will expand to the point where enough good players of both genders come in and we finally see more women at the highest levels. But that may not happen.
I've brought up that issue before on HN and nobody "flipped their lid." The problem is that it tends to prove the opposite of what you might want to use it to prove. For a long time, there has been a gender difference in the SAT Math. The average is about the same between genders, but the standard deviation for men is larger, so they earn more of the highest score and the lowest scores. 2/3 of people with perfect score are men.
But what does that prove? Most working programmers didn't pull a perfect SAT Math score. And programming teams tend to be much less than 35% women. In other words, even if aptitude for programming was determined purely by mathematical ability (and arguably programming involves many mixed skills unlike chess), women are dramatically underrepresented.
Well, you're the only one bringing up the SAT math gap. But let's see...
> the standard deviation for men is larger
As is frequently pointed out, men are also overrepresented in homelessness and insane asylums.
> Most working programmers didn't pull a perfect SAT Math score
I did :) But seriously, I don't think anyone is interested just in the perfect score #s, preferring to look at averages instead, where there is still a gap.
> And programming teams tend to be much less than 35% women.
True. I think 8-10% is a typical number. There are several other factors to consider, e.g. there is a 10% gender gap in labor force participation as a whole, not just programming.
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More often than not, people point out the SAT math gap because it seems a struggle for some to even acknowledge there even could be statistical difference in mental ability (innate or developed early) between men and women.
It doesn't "prove" anything, except that tabula rasa is not the only game in town.
I guess it depends how broad you go. For example worked with many female web designers. And qa testers. But ratio of say backend programmers is very very low. Guess your stat doesn't say that.
Graduate rate doesn't matter because it feels like many women do the programming thing for 2 years and drop out.
(All this is sad and I wish we had more females. Businesses with more healthy male to female ratios tend to be less bro)
Not sure there is a official term for it, but there seem to be a similar pattern in majority (>80%) of professions. Gender segregation happens on both on a market level and on a inter-profession level, and for both men and women. For example, there is about 20% of men in the teaching profession but much less (ie single digit) of male teachers that teach languages. On the flip side there is much more than 20% men in the subgroup of physical education teachers, and even more that leaves the schools and becomes sport instructors (with a teacher degree).
In Sweden there is about 12.5% of employed citizens that work in a profession that has at minimum 40% men and women, but I don't know the portion of that minority group that actually have 40% coworkers with a different gender then themselves with identical title and work tasks. My random guess would be around 33%, which would translate to 4% of the total employed population.
So this might be statistically true, but it doesn't mean that men are inherently better. Just like people born rich aren't inherently better at being rich later on.
I think people talk a lot about the gender gap in these things. But there's a decent amount of proof from other domains that these differences are more likely to be caused by environmental differences than otherwise.
One common story that is told is that men have more variance in outcomes than women; regardless of whether men are taller, the very tallest and shortest individuals are both male. So if you select for the people with the most board memory, the most pattern recognition, the most patience, and whatever other weird traits, you could have entirely equal representation if you take the top 50% or the top 10%, but the top 0.1% could be all male.
Men exhibit more variance in traits that are expressed on the X-chromosome, as they only have one of them.
Something as complicated as intelligence is not strongly tied to a single genetic marker, so while there may be some variance, it won't be nearly as broad as in something simpler (but still complicated), like height.
I heard Viswanathan Anand on TV a long time ago (when he had just become world champion), he claimed getting physically fitter had a definite impact on his game. Maybe that implicitly means there is physical fitness is a factor, hence women are disadvantaged?
(I'm just trying to reason against you, I don't think the fitness Anand was talking about requires crossing the boundary where being male is an advantage.)
The physical training is for endurance, as at high levels chess can be an exhausting sport. This is because winning chess competitions involves concentrating intensely for hours, days, or even (in rare cases like Kasparov vs Karpov) weeks while being under enormous and constant stress. That can be very draining if you're not prepared for it both physically and mentally.
I would liken competitive chess to an endurance sport like marathon running instead of to something like boxing or sumo wrestling, where physical mass and brute force can be deciding factors.
There's no reason that women can't be as physically or mentally prepared for such as sport as men.
Physical fitness is certainly important but I doubt for chess it's on the level that's not achievable for women. Unless you are talking about chess boxing which is an interesting sport.
The simple fact is yes, for whatever reasons, women are physically disadvantaged at chess. Regardless of how shocking that is. (Cue "differ t oppprtunities", "different emphasis" etc. which I am very much willing to listen to cited arguments for).
Even if you intend to have a good faith discussion about gender dimorphism in chess (whether it be intrinsic or extrinsic), the resulting thread has a high potential for descending into ideological chaos.
I'd recommend not taking the stand that "women are physically disadvantaged in chess" is a "simple fact." You welcomed citations for reasons why that may or may not be - but much like sociological studies across ethnic differences in accomplishment, studies across gender differences accomplishment for non-physical activity are going to be, shall we say, "muddled."
People may not be able to levy citations that argue against that thesis, but it's still a very difficult thesis to defend both socially and rhetorically. Engaging in dialectics about it is unlikely to be productive, and I think it's probably more fair to take an even ground in the absence of compelling evidence on other side. Extrinsically, yes, women display collective disparity in overall chess accomplishment. But we cannot infer anything about womens' chess ability intrinsically unless we have more women in chess. Specifically, we cannot infer anything physically about the female brain that would demonstrate a disadvantage.
This doesn't mean you're wrong; it just means that it's so emotionally loaded, and so devoid of clear, replicable data that even a debate with citations will probably be disappointing at best, and personally insulting at worst.
>This doesn't mean you're wrong; it just means that it's so emotionally loaded, and so devoid of clear, replicable data that even a debate with citations will probably be disappointing at best, and personally insulting at worst.
That's right. If one said women are better home makers, teachers, and parents, people would either agree with you or say you're being sexist. What is wrong with teaching, parenting or home making? Without taking a position on whether men are better than women at chess, why does it even matter if women are better at some things and men at others? It's so overwhelmingly political and emotional, and why should women be ashamed to be good parents or home makers? Those are no less respectable than any other occupation. However, as you said, you can't even touch this topic without getting in trouble.
The fact is the top 100 chess players in the world are men. That may be due to higher variance in men's mental abilities; however, the fact is the reason you are downvoted is for failure to abide by political correctness.
