I’m sure many women can beat many men at chess. As a very average (and even more occasional) player, I’d be wiped out by anyone taking part in the World Women’s Chess Championship that starts May 12. But at the highest level, men outperform them, and so far as I know they do on average at less elite levels too. I can understand this with physical sports like running, football, or golf (in which, IIRC, the top woman barely gets into the top 100 players). But why with a contest purely of brainpower?
Steven Goldberg does a good job of explaining this in his book Why Men Rule.
Basically, women get hit twice when it comes to mathematically-based tasks like chess.
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Although the average intelligence of men and women is equal, the standard deviation for men is much higher. This means that there are many more smart men than women, as well as many more stupid men. Women tend to cling more to that average level. Hence, the big brains of history have tended to be men.
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Men are just better, naturally, at mathematics and logic. With very few exceptions, the great mathematicians, composers, chess players, etc., have been men.
Don’t be surprised if this thread ends up in Great Debates. 
I’ve wondered about that, and I came with the following explanation :
When high level chess player are interviewed, they frequently mention agressivity and “a will to kill” as being necessary to win. Since men are generally more agressive than women, it probably give them a significant advantage on the average. I believe too (and I’m going to be flammed for this) that it also plays a part in the fact that women are underepresented at the highest levels of the political and business world. If you really want to climb the ladder, you’ve to eliminate a lot of competition in the process, hence to be strongly agressive.
Besides, men usually have a better ability than women for spatial representation, which is obviously extremely important for chess players.
In the words of Guybrush Threepwood, “I have more important things to do that play easily-mastered games like chess”-Monkey Island 4
I really have nothing to add. I think the above replies cover everything.
Most serial killers are men also. You wouldn’t think there would be a link between chess and serial killers, but maybe there is.
Perhaps it might have something to do with the fact that far, far more men than women get seriously into chess.
The top woman, Judit Polgar, is ranked number 9 on the men’s list. She beat Anatoly Karpov, who preceeded Garry Kasparov as world champ, in an exhibition a few years ago.
I won’t flame you for this because I think you are basically correct. Women don’t have that level of “will to kill” that men have. And yes, this probably helps explain why there are less women at the highest levels of business and politics too. I just want to say that this is a shame–not in chess, but certainly in politics.
We need a lot less of the “will to kill” in politics and a lot more will to compromise and be diplomatic. Bill Clinton was criticized for gathering too much advice on issues and being too willing to compromise. Perhaps that was his “womanly side” in action. I happen to think those attributes are part of what made him one of the best presidents of the 20th century.
One day, the world will wake up and realize that in these times of relative prosperity and peace in the world, women make far more appropriate and effective leaders. Of course, we still have a lot of senseless killing to do before we get to that point, but I believe we’ll get there someday.
And when that exulted day arrives, men will still be the best at vestigal aggressiveness such as chess, American football and video games, and still play a very important role in society; but in the important areas of politics and business naked aggression will be a thing of the past.
It’s all a part of our evolution.
Less “will to kill”? Where in hell does this notion come from? Maybe the women you know are all passive, compromising diplomats without a mean bone in their bodies. My world varies slightly.
Women can be viscious, being (on average) less strong then men their agression takes differnt forms.
Yea yea, I love me, the world would be a better place if it were led by vegetarian females instead of flesh eating males. But who would keep the pacifists in power?
To quote Saturday night Live “we’ll just take it back, what are they gonna do? they’re a bunch of meeks”
As a final note (god I hope it isnt a Hijack we were talking chess) try stepping between a mother bear and her cubs.
There are more male geniuses. There are also far more male retarded persons. The Y chromosome is the cause. Men occupy more of the ends of the bell curve. Which also means we get far more bad things. This does not in any way mean men are smarter than women, on the average- in fact slightly the opposite. But it does mean that out of 1000 men or women, the smartest man in that group wil be smarter than the smartest women- but the men might well also occupy the bottom 5 slots, too.
I always thought it was explained by (beware, gross generalities ahead!) men having a greater spacial intelligence. Therefore at better at visualising the complex relationships between the pieces and future moves.
The same argument is used for women being rotten at map reading. But that’s an entirely different gross generality. :))
Exactly! Women on average are still slowly getting the idea that they can do things pretty much just as well as men (unless it is a size issue- in some cases, or related to hormones, like testosterone). On the whole, of course. Individual women are of course there, look at the womens world chess organization for example. The numbers pale compared to men though. I think when more women start playing chess, more of them will rise to the top.
I’d subscribe to this theory. After all, chess is more about pattern recognition than “intelligence” anyway.
There is absolutely no evidence to support this, as far as I know, except as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The reason there are so few women in mathematics or the sciences is that they are brought up in an environment that tells them that they aren’t as good. Frankly, the girls in my classes tend to outperform the boys, if anything.
Also, why do you call chess a “mathematically-based” task? Yes, there are certain basic similarities, but I’ve yet to meet or hear of anyone who truly excelled in both. Yes, chess (in theory) can be completely modelled and solved abstractly, but it’s almost impossible in practice and it’s an intellectual cul-de-sac. Mathematicians tend to like results that can be applied elsewhere.
Now, let’s close down the bigotmobile and move on.
To put it in perspective - why can I beat my wife at Twisted Metal 2? And MarioKart? And any other video game when we’re both close in intelligence? Because I’ve dedicated much of my life to games, and she actually goes and does productive things with her time.
Maybe women just don’t care to play chess. Or maybe it’s not passed down to them - I was taught chess by my father, but he never taught my sisters. Like RickJay said, it probably has to do with the fact that far fewer women get into these games.
The only other alternative, in looking of terms of evolution and survival, is that men were generally believed to be the hunters and fighters, and when you hunt you have to have a strategy, and the tribe with the best strategy eats and survives. Therefore this trait is important in men. But I know some women Ph.D.s that would blow me away logically, they’re amazing.
Wrong and double-wrong. To get the good cites, you are going to have to go to the book I cited. The cognitive differences between men and women have been tested and proved and tested again–there are differences at every age, and certainly not all of them favor men. Girls develop languange fluency, on average, quicker than boys, and tend to be better readers until boys catch up later.
The difference in standard deviation in intelligence is also well-proven, and this phenomenon has caused some problems for EHS, the company that does the SATs. As you know, there are sometimes special events or camps for kids who do better on the SATs, and these end up highly skewed toward boys. This puts EHS on the defensive; they have a hard time explaining the un-PC truth: more boys tend to get the top scores, even though the averages for boys and girls are about the same (which means, yes, more boys also do abysmally on the test).
What you’re saying here simply can’t be taken seriously. Chess is, at bottom, 100% pure mathematics. You are pulling your PC talking points out of your you-know-what without any evidence to back it up.
You’re in the wrong here, friend. Don’t call me a bigot when I’m simply citing the facts. You’ve offered nothing but your “AFAIK” ruminations.
Oh yes, I said “double wrong” above for a reason. The claim, often made, that girls do poorly in an area or are not interested in an area merely because society discourages them is poor logic and wishful PC-thinking (that is, the desire to see the unskilled as victims of some sort).
Girls are NOT discouraged from playing chess. I was in chess club for 4 years in HS and again for 2 years in grad school. I have NEVER seen girls discouraged from playing or made fun of if they did. If anything, we nerdy boys would have been overjoyed to have girls take an interest in the game and hang around us. The simple fact is that girls aren’t just not very good at chess; they’re not interested in it in the first place.
To become good at chess requires a ton of practice and study; skill alone will not cut it. It’s true that men approach goals (on average!) with a lot more effort, agression and ambition. So this is a strike against women becoming top chess players; in fact, it’s probably enough to knock out a lot of the women who have the innate ability to be good. (This is the main point in Goldberg’s book: men are naturally more willing to make BIG sacrifices to achieve their goals.)
We had a good girl in our club in HS who played for several years. At any chess tournament, there would be a few girls. They were NOT discouraged at all. In fact, Judit Polgar and her sister (also at least a master) were heavily trained by their father from a young age–this was probably enough to overcome the interest barrier, since they were more or less forced to play. A good chunk of natural talent and they were able to get where they are. Judit is fantastic, there’s no denying it. Still, it is generally considered impossible for her to become world champion. She is nowhere near the level of a Kasparov.
Almost anything can be mathematically modelled and studied. That doesn’t mean it’s mathematics. Is what a grandmaster does when he or she “does chess” the same as what a Fields Medallist does when he or she “does math”? No. You might as well say that physics or chemistry are mathematics and be equally wrong to do so.
As for evidence, I already cited what I’ve seen happen in my classes. It isn’t just me, either. Across other instructors teaching the same courses, the girls cluster slightly ahead of the mean if anything. Further (though also anecdotal), the women majoring in mathematics at my undergraduate institution were more likely to be in the competant group than the hangers-on.
Mind you, I’m not denying the difference in deviations. There are psychological differences in approach that spread the men’s curve in most fields. I’m only contesting the “men are better at mathematics and logic” point because (a) I have not seen evidence of it in the real world and (b) not to do so leads immediately to complacency: if women aren’t as good at mathematics and logic, why bother teaching them mathematics and logic in the first place?
When the USSR was doing their communist “thing”, didn’t they try and select chess masters at a young age? Did they exclude females? In that kind of environment, I doubt that interest in the game is at all relevant.
Cultural reasons aside, chess is quite similar to the hunt, which was generally the males job. You must plan an attack, trap the prey, attempt to think what the prey might be thinking.