I came across this https://en.chessbase.com/post/what-gender-gap-in-chessRefluxSemantic wrote:I prefer your narrative, but I'm afraid it might not be true. I agree that I jumped to a conclusion that isn't supported by hard data though.Goodspeed wrote:The queen's gambit is an unrealistic series in many ways, but not necessarily in that way.RefluxSemantic wrote:Its also the case that women for example cant really compete with men at chess (yes, unfortunately the queen's gambit is a rather unrealistic series).
It's hard to square the idea that women lack the mental capacity to compete in games like chess with the fact that there is very little to suggest that women are less intelligent than men.
More likely is that these factors, unrelated to mental capacity, contribute to the fact that men pursue careers in chess much more than women:
- Men's generally more competitive spirit
- Parents' reluctance to let their 12 year old talented daughter travel to tournaments with a group of teenage boys and young men
- Parents being much less likely to even teach their daughters chess or encourage them to pursue it, because it's not a "feminine" activity
- Chess being a "boy's club" making it a less rewarding social experience for most girls
- The stereotype that women don't have the capacity to compete in chess making them less inclined to pursue it (self-fulfilling)
One very telling story is that of Judit Polgar, whose dad had her focus on chess from a very early age. She reached somewhere around 2750 ELO which was top 10 at the time and is only ~100 ELO below Carlsen's current rating. It's highly unlikely that this person just so happens to be a one in a million talent like Carlsen because her career in chess was predetermined by her parents, yet simply because she focused on chess from a young age she reached a level no woman before or after her has ever achieved.
The Polgar story doesn't stop there: She had a couple of sisters who were also world-class chess players, and people generally agree that she wasn't even the most talented one, just the most hard-working. If interested: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/ar ... experiment
So who is to say how many female one in a million, Carlsen-like talents have been born and never played chess, started playing it too late, or played it early on, were good at it, but then didn't pursue it as a career? And would this have been different if they were male?
Would a female Carlsen, with the exact same talent for chess he has right now, have a current rating of 2860? Or would it have been 2600? Or N/A?
The point is that the stars have to align in multiple ways: You need that one in a million talent to be the best in the world, but you also need the encouragement and the motivation to pursue chess as a career. The former is rare, but the latter is also rare. The stars aligned for Carlsen. They didn't align for the other thousands of people who may be as talented as Carlsen but never worked at it as hard as he did. It's no stretch to assume at least some of those are female.
Regardless, it's a pretty convincing argument against the gender gap in chess.
In short: As of right now, with the available data, I think it's wrong to conclude that women "can't" compete with men at chess.
They argue that the ELO gap between the top male player and the top female player is statistically expected, considering the difference in size of the two groups.
What's most fascinating about this to me is that, as they mention in the article, it would be expected for females to underperform at least a little bit on account of the factors I mentioned in the quoted post above, but statistically they don't underperform at all. This may be because female players only pursue careers in chess if they are especially dedicated, compared to males who may sometimes pursue a career in chess not out of passion but because it's "expected" after how well they did as a kid.
Regardless, it's another pretty convincing argument against the gender gap in chess.