Yes, the women who do play chess are every bit as interested, but it’s still not surprising that the highest players are all men. Someone’s got to be the best, for whatever reasons (I’m still assuming that gender has no bearing on ability). If men in chess outnumber women by 13 to 1, say, then there’s a 13 in 14 chance, all other things being equal, that the top player in the world would be a man. There’s a 169 in 196 chance that the top two players will be men, and so on, until you see a 50-50 chance that the top 9-10 players will be men, even though women are not inherently less skilled. I don’t know the actual numbers, but that should give an idea of what’s going on.
What is so wrong with saying that there is a possibility that the game of chess has a gender bias?
I hate to be so un-PC, but men and women are different. I don’t have a problem with that. I would never say that women are less intelligent than men, but I don’t think I have a problem saying that, in general, women are not as good at the game of chess as men. This seems to be supported by the fact that there is only one woman in the top 100 chess players in the world. I also recall reading, (but this could be way off) that there was only one woman ever ranked in the top 100. Why would it be wrong to say that women aren’t as successful at the game as men?
One of the reasons that the Polgar sisters are so successful is that they were giver a Tiger Woods-like push by their father, an avid chess fan. Women unfortunately generally don’t get that kind of push to excel in competitive sports and games. Remember that the sisters are still very young.
FIDE should not be proud of themselves though. They have the dubious distinction of kicking out both the men’s champion (Kasparov) and the women’s champion (first Zsusan Polgar, then Xie Jun), without allowing them to defend their titles. Kasparov has the world title of the group he created, the PCA.
If you get a random sample of little baby boys and girls (it’s have to be a fairly large sample) and raise them exactly the same (and I want proof that every aspect of their lives was the same) and them saw who was good in chess you could say that “group X is better than group Y” or vice versa…untill then we have to factor in the “nurture” part of “nature vs. nurture”.
There aren’t a lot of chess stars from Africa, either, that’s because most of Africa doesn’t have access to chess instruction. See?
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1971 Candidates’ Matches:
http://www.mark-weeks.com/chess/7072$cix.htm
That page contains the results of all the Interzonals, Candidates matches and tournaments, and World Championships until the present. Apologies for the hijack.
I personally agree with Chronos who stated that the reason women appear worse is lack of interest, not lack of ability. That same opinion is held by many in the chess community. There aren’t as many women in many fields, it’s not a Good Thing but at this point we simply have to acknowledge that “that’s how it is,” and make efforts to show young girls that they can do most of the same things as young men.
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Yes, but most of the top men have been trained to play professional chess from a ridiculously young age, especially in the former Soviet Union, where talent was somewhat systematically found and developed. In the case of the Polgar sisters, where from the age of 4 if I recall correctly they have been training for hours nearly everyday (to the degree where they were home-schooled, I mean, their father was serious about it), they’ve achieved reasonable success.
FWIW -
IGM Yasser Seirawan has this to say in Play Winning Chess, Microsoft Press, 1995:
The only sport I can think of that has as much confusion as far as rankings and titles is boxing. Perhaps one on one sports have a tendency towards controversy.
Does the PCA also have lower standards for women?
OT: I found this book very helpful as a beginner.