#Chess #MenVsWomen #GenderEquality #ChessTournaments #Fide
When it comes to chess, the question of why men and women don’t play against each other is a common one. 🤔 While chess may not be a physical game, the lack of mixed-gender play is noticeable, especially in official Fide tournaments. 🏆 Let’s dive into the reasons behind this practice and whether there is a proper rationale behind it.
## Historical Context 📚
Chess has a long history dating back centuries, and traditionally, it has been a male-dominated sport. The lack of gender diversity in chess can be traced back to societal norms and historical biases that have persisted over time. 🕰️ While women have made significant strides in the world of chess, the competition remains largely segregated by gender.
## Skill Disparities 🔍
One argument often put forward for segregating men and women in chess is the perceived skill disparities between the two genders. 🎯 Some believe that men have a natural advantage over women when it comes to strategic games like chess, leading to a lack of competitive balance in mixed-gender play. However, this argument is highly debated and controversial within the chess community.
## Cultural Factors 🌍
Cultural factors also play a significant role in the segregation of men and women in chess. 🌟 In some societies, there may be a lack of support and opportunities for women to pursue chess at the same level as men. This imbalance can further perpetuate the divide between male and female players in the sport.
## Promoting Gender Equality 💪
Despite the challenges, there is a growing movement within the chess community to promote gender equality and inclusivity. 🌈 Initiatives are being launched to encourage more women to participate in chess, break down stereotypes, and create a more level playing field for all players, regardless of gender. ♟️
In conclusion, while the practice of segregating men and women in chess tournaments may have historical reasons, it is important to strive towards a more inclusive and equitable future for the sport. 🌟 By fostering a culture of diversity and inclusivity, we can create a level playing field where players of all genders can compete on equal footing. Let’s continue to support and empower women in chess and work towards a more inclusive chess community. 💪👑
They do. Tournaments are open. Women can sign and play in any open tournament.
And if you ask for a proper reason – men are better at chess on average.
No one has mentioned how misogynistic chess clubs/class/etc can be.
It’s the same reason you don’t see girls playing D&D or MtG. No because our brains are “different” lol but because it’s SUPER uncomfy to be in a room of desperate thirsty gatekeeping nerds while you’re just trying to have fun playing a game.
It’s not like that, there is a women’s chess league that was made to promote chess amongst women and regular chess leagues where everyone competes. It’s people that hear that there is women’s chess so it must mean that there is men’s chess too
They can. There’s an open division and a women’s division. But if you don’t place good you don’t win money
Because men represent intelligence distribution more in the extremes. In other words, they are the smartest and the dumbest, which is why you see the best of chess players being men since it heavily relies on BRAIN.
Just to clarify, at amateur and semi-pro level girls’ & boys’ pools are combined, and there’s only one single tourney, and yes, girls can and do win them. It’s mostly just the Masters level FIDE tournaments, what you’d call “Pro chess”, that run a separate Women’s category
Since you said ELI5, there are 4 major issues / reasons:
1. Simply put, chess is a male-heavy game. To be a pro 99.9% you’ve gotta start at the age of 3-4. It takes serious training and tutoring (≡ $$$). And due to gender biases, parents have a lower risk appetite for girls. So, fewer girls get the necessary support to pursue this passion in their formative years, leading to fewer Women Masters.
2. Since there are fewer female pros, if FIDE only conducted a single tournament, very few women would ever get the chance to compete at the top level, which would only further worsen the female player pool. By having a women’s category, yes the ELO floor is lowered, but at least a good number of women get a chance to play at top level tourneys.
3. Even if women enter the Open category (remember, the categories are Open and Women’s, not Men’s and Women’s) it is accused that in the lower rounds disproportionately more women are played against each other. Women cite a malicious intent of protecting male egos and having women eliminate each other. Others say it’s done so all women are not eliminated in the early rounds by the men. What’s the truth, is anyone’s guess.
4. Just as any other sport, tourneys pay big bucks for winning and being near the top of the table. That’s how athletes get their names in the news and attract sponsors. If you were Yifan, the only 2600+ active female player, what is more practical? To win the Women’s category, prize pool and a photo with the trophy, or be a no-name 17th in the Open category?
All of the above, a complicated mix of gender biases, practical realities and financial implications work together, ending up making pro chess gendered.
PS: There is possibly another factor. Male IQ bell curve is observably flatter than the Female IQ curve, meaning, there’s a higher chance of men being either geniuses or mentally retarded, as compared to women. And there is a significant correlation between IQ and chess prowess, so that would seem like a “natural” explanation of fewer female pros. However, there is seriously low quality and conflicting data on all this, so at the moment, it’s best ignored.
Men and women can equally play the game. There’s no reason why a woman couldn’t compete and beat a top level man in chess, unlike in say tennis or boxing where biological differences give men the advantage (woman have the advantage in ultramarathons though).
However there’s a lot more social aspects. A game that is dominated by men is going to be a hard place for a woman to feel as comfortable in and therefore as able to compete as a man. The same applies in several other sports, like say pool. There’s quite honestly poor sportsmanship expressed by certain champions against their male opponents, such poor sportsmanship will get even worse against female opponents.
Women chess leagues were therefore created to give more recognition to women. As the game is played by more women, and you see players dedicating themselves at equally young ages, then you could esoext eventually for women to appear more in the top lists.
It’s important to note theres an well noted phenomenon where teenage girls give up on hobbies etc as teens when faced with competition, especially when those things are not see as traditionally a place where women have been before. Despite women really being not really worse at STEM for example, many women stop applying themselves at such an age because of antagonism from male classmates, and dealing with identity issues while struggling with something. Sure some young men face similar difficulties, but fewer young men are trying to branch into female dominated spaces with few male role models.
I think the truth is, there are a variety of factors which explain the massive skill difference at the top level between men and women chess players.
Chess requires a large amount of training and teaching from a young age. Historically this was something that was only afforded to men throughout most cultures, hence there is some historical sociocultural advantages that men have.
Although nowadays this is less as any chess club that would refuse a girl based on sex would instantly be shut down, but these kinds of things can still permeate.
There is also the statistical mathematical factor which explains some proportion of the gap. Far more young boys for whatever reason play and learn chess than young girls. If there are less women participating overall, it would be natural to observe less women at the highest level, in similar ratios.
This is interesting because this itself is a gap that probably has a multitude of factors contributing to it e.g. sociocultural norms, inherent interest, etc.
There is also the argument that this works in reverse I.e. young boys are better than young girls for whatever reason, and attrition rates are lower in things you are good at.
There is also probably some biological component. Twin studies show intellectual capabilities are heavily biologically driven, up to 70% is genetic, and mens brains are biologically very different to women’s. In general they have been shown in some studies to be better at pattern recognition and memory based tasks, two skills probably very useful to have for a game like chess. Similarly to how’s its been shown that men are on average more competitive and are not driven to quit due to competition as often, another mental trait driven by biology to some degree.
The truth is the last point is often ignored or dismissed because it can be demeaning or contradictory to the idea that biology plays no part in the differing mental traits.
However statistically it probably does, and if we’re trying to be honest in finding the truth behind the gap in women’s vs men’s skill at the highest level, it wouldn’t be accurate to dismiss it, just like it wouldn’t be accurate to dismiss the other factors.
Its because of farts. Male chess players are notorious farters and women cant handle the stink
Men get angry when a woman outsmarts or outcompetes them in some way, that goes for chess guys as well.
Chess, like most things, is rooted in massively sexist culture and whilst it is making slow progress it sits within a wider systemic issue across most of society where women are not really free to pursue their passions in the same way men are.
As most comments have answered – they do in fact. Very often. My question is – why would you ask the question as a statement that is true when it is not.
Basically it’s more profitable to promote female chess as a separate sports. If you have men and women all playing together, women would be submerged by their counterparts. From a marketing point of view, it doesn’t help female players to shine as stars since they keep losing, nor adding too much quality to chess game itself.
On the contrary, segregation makes some female players become “top players” even though they’re not even top 100. It helps the tournament to promote the individuals as well as encouraging more young girls to play the game.
I found this quite informative/interesting on the subject. https://quillette.com/2024/03/22/why-do-men-dominate-chess/
It could(!!!) be that the type of intelligence needed for chess has a greater variance for men than for women. This would imply that while on average female players are as good as male players, men are more likely to be the best — and the worst.
Let’s say you’re in the top 10 of women in chess. You’re probably 200-400 in the world.
You can either play woman’s tournaments (woman’s Grand Swiss, woman’s world cup…) and try to qualify to become world champion. And earn a significant amount of money.
Or you can play the open section (i.e. male and female but in practice almost always male) and have almost no chance of winning.
What do you choose?
But sometimes women play in the open section. Ju Wenjun played in Tata Steel 2024. She was probably mostly invited because of her rating (a male 2549 rated would probably not have been considered unless he had some out of the ordinary trait) but in the end she didn’t perform that bad ending on 10th place (out of 14)
The Eli5 is, there are less women who are that competitive in chess VS men who are competitive in chess
Adding to what other have said, I want to point out that the absence of women from the top rubric of chess does not indicate that men are better at chess. In fact, there are studies suggesting that given the quantity of female players and how they are distributed across the ranks, it actually seems that women slightly outperform men in chess.
Because it seems that the dudes who are deep into playing chess well are grade A creepers, so if you want any women to play the game you have to get them a way to do so without being harassed and stalked.
Apart from other valid factors already mentioned (social, upbringing = less female players), there might also be a strong genetic component: Top level chess requires a very extreme skill set / combination of attributes and skills.
Men vary much more on any genetic scale than females. E.g. there are more super-intelligent men at the higher and, and more male village idiots at the lower end of the intelligence scale. And that gets even worse when a combination of skills is sampled.
You need ppl with extreme focus, commitment, zeal and abstract thinking? If you only sample at the high end of those scales (like competitive high-end chess does), you will get way more male than female samples.
Same ofc goes for the other end: If you want the scum of the earth, the worst and most lost human specimens which embody all that is bad? Well … you will get predominantly men.
The same applies to other areas, like high-level management, research and so on, where the simple statistical sampling done by the process leads to skewed results.
Now, how strong that factor is, especially in comparison with social factors, is yet to be defined. But evidence for now suggests it is a very strong factor in chess.
Men and women play in chess tournaments against each other all the time. Most tournaments are open class meaning everyone can play, or rather they are classed by rating.
The problem that chess and a lot of other sports have is that there are less women joining the sport and women are more likely to leave the sport as well. So there are far more men then women playing competitive chess. In an effort to promote top female chess players the top tournaments have separate female classes in addition to the open class. When signing up women can chose which class to compete in. But if they sign up for the open class they are going to face much stronger competitors and get much lower scores which means less exposure and less prize money.
This have helped get more women into chess as it have made several top raking female chess players famous. Something their equally strong male competitors have not been. However this system have gotten some criticism, even among these top female players. Some have been facing a dilemma when signing up to tournaments as they can do pretty well against the top competitors in the open class but will be guaranteed to win the female class.
Did “The Queens Gambit” lie to me?
They do.
There are mixed feelings about it though.
Hou Yifan, the youngest women’s world champion, has stated that competing with top males is an opportunity.
She however resigned from a tournament claiming that matchmaking was fixed against women causing them to finish lower than they would if the matchmaking was fair against them. The way it was fixed was by putting women against other women more than they should have been, making women getting knocked out being guaranteed from those matches.
In Hou Yifan’s 10 matches, she was paired with other women 7 times despite women being less common in the tournament.
[https://www.chess.com/article/view/hou-yifan-interview-chess](https://www.chess.com/article/view/hou-yifan-interview-chess)
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/feb/03/hou-yifan-resigns-after-five-moves-gibraltar
Not all tournaments / organizations section people by gender.
However, as with many other cases, it has roots in the game being male-dominated early on, and either for social rules/values or personal interest reasons, women largely did not play, or were discouraged from playing. Women-only divisions aim to build interest in chess among women, or to create tournaments that are less dominated by male players who might have an advantage or longer span of experience/support on average.
In addition, some nations also just have rules that divide competitive games/sports of all kind into men and women divisions.
Because the dudes are insufferable and think women are icky. Tournaments have been tried where men and women compete directly against each other…and the guys behaved atrociously
Women can play with men. But as there are many more competitive men chess players, a women only tournament might encourage more women to participate.
They do!
There are women tournaments and championships where only women can participate.
But most tournaments are opens, which anybody can participate no matter their gender. (You said you never saw it but it is common, watch any woman chess streamer such as Anna Cramling going to an tournament, she will face men and women).
Now you don’t see them at top level tournament because they are less good. Hou Yifan is 2632 right now, which does not put her in the top 100 (not too far though), and then the second woman is 2559 which is really a step below.
Then your question may be, why are they less good at top level? The best explanation we have is educational environment. Boys are trained earlier and pushed more to dedicate their life to it, role models are all men etc…
It may change with the next generation of Indian and Chinese players, we’ll see.