Compulsory chess for schoolgirls: Will schoolgirls master the men’s game of chess?

Chess is dominated by men at a professional level, but schoolgirls are starting to fight back. Radhika Sanghani discovers why it’s always been a man’s game and how it’s not as nerdy as it used to be

By Radhika Sanghani
10:30AM BST 22 May 2014

Chess is very much a man’s world. A woman has never won the World Chess Championship (which began in 1886) and fewer then one per cent of all chess grandmasters are female. But the problem isn’t that women are worse than chess at men – it’s that there are far, far fewer women chess players than male ones.

Lorin D’Costa, 29, an international master (that’s one level below a grandmaster, which is the highest level you can be) tells me that this is because girls tend to stop playing chess around the age of 12, while boys continue on.

“Girls don’t continue playing because they drop out too early,” he explains. “They think it’s not worth all the hassle. A lot of girls think, why should I do this when I can hang out with my friends?”

But D’Costa is helping to change this attitude, at least in one London girls’ school. He is employed by North London Collegiate School to give compulsory chess lessons to the primary school pupils, aged six to eight. On top of that, he runs an after school chess club for both the primary and secondary school girls. The club went from having one attendee back when it started four years ago, to having a peak of 20.

NLCS is one of the only schools in the UK to dedicate so much time to chess, and it’s all part of encouraging girls to stick with chess, so the gender divide can eventually be evened out at a higher level. Already things are looking up, as two of the top three players in the last UK schools’ chess challenge were girls, and more than 70,000 children took part.

But on a professional level, the numbers of women in chess are still frighteningly low, and there is only one woman who makes the top 100 world players. It seems that girls don’t carry on with the strategic game because they tend to want to do other things as well, and don’t apply a laser-type focus on their chess ability. It falls by the wayside while they also do sports, music, or just hang out with their friends. D’Costa says that in his experience, girls only carry on the game if they’re very, very good.

D’Costa tells me: “You find the boys more obsessive – [with an attitude of] ‘I’m really going to go for it’,” he says. “Boys say ‘I want to be the best at one thing’. But I don’t believe that chess should just be a boy-related game. It’s harder for girls unless you go to a school like this [NLCS]. Girls in some schools might be the ones who don’t quit because they were high up and want to take it further.”

I know what he means because I was one of those girls who dropped out. After winning my primary school’s championships aged 11, I quit chess when I got to secondary school. I knew I would never be a champion, so I stopped playing and dabbled in some other hobbies instead, using the free time to see my mates more. I didn’t feel like I was missing out, because, honestly? Chess was not cool. At all. 


Chess still isn’t that cool

The girls at NLCS chess club agree that chess still has a bad reputation but they get around it by not talking about it. To them, the first rule of chess club is that you do not talk about chess club. Elizabeth, 13 who represented England in the Under-12s, says: “If you talk about it all the time it makes you nerdy and uncool but if you don’t talk about it and just go to chess club, you’ll be fine.”

Steve Barrett, who plays for the White Rose team in the European championships, thinks this is why there are so few girls interested in chess. “I guess it’s because chess isn’t perceived as being particularly cool as an activity and the age when you’re getting into chess, which these days is pretty young, cool matters,” he says.

“When girls get to 12, 13, 14, they’re interested in other things. There aren’t so many role models for girls on the top level and it’s not considered a particularly cool activity even though it’s not as nerdy as it used to be.”

At the moment, the only real role models for girls are Judit Polgar – the only woman in the world top 100 and the strongest female player of all time, Hou Yifan, the women’s world chess champion, who is only 20-years-old.

You can pretty much count them on one hand, compared to the hundreds of male grandmasters, and with today’s teens being fed a constant diet of Miley Cyrus and One Direction, it’s no surprise that many girls just opt out.

Boys are ‘aggressive, loud and gross’

Malcolm Pein, the Telegraph’s chess columnnist, an international master and founder of Chess in Schools and Communities which aims to bring chess into state schools, tells me: “Girls mature earlier and like many things it becomes classified as a silly game or just something that boys do. Quite a lot of boys give up too but far more girls do. It’s really skewed. Like a lot of things when you have far more boys than girls, they make a lot more noise.”

The girls agree with this. Aanya, 12, a member of NLCS’s chess club, tells me that there were always a lot more boys at tournaments – sometimes as much as 100 boys to two girls. “More of them were quite aggressive and loud and gross,” she says. “They would stamp their pieces down and bang the clock.”

When I ask the group whether the lack of girls in chess bothers them, they all say yes – but they do appreciate the benefits. Sophia, 15, says: “It does kind of annoy me that there aren’t very many girls. But it works to your advantage. In quite a few tournaments there’s always a girls’ prize. If there aren’t many, you’re likely to get that position.” 


Separate gendered tournaments = sexism?

This is part of the problem. Women have separate tournaments such as the women’s world chess championship, and a separate title of ‘woman grandmaster’. It means that they are constantly separated from the male players.

Elizabeth says: “I don’t think it’s right in some ways because it’s sexist. Girls work just as hard as boys so I don’t think they should get a different prize. Girls who play chess are competitive so they just want a title. They don’t mind if you’re grandmaster or women grandmaster.”

But the separate competitions could be the reason why women are not on the same level as men. Pein explains that women like the Polgar sisters (Judit’s sisters are also major players) only succeeded in chess because their father refused to let them take part in women’s only competitions. He told them: “The only reason girls aren’t as good is because they’re only playing girls.”

This, Pein says, is why more women are climbing up the ratings list, because they are deciding to play against men and thus gain more points when they defeat the higher players (mainly men). It means that while chess clubs like the girls-only one at NLCS are a great initiative, it still leaves girls mainly playing against other girls.

If we want to even out this playing field once and for all, more and more UK schools need to encourage their girls and boys to play chess – preferably together. Pein’s charity is a good place to start, as is hiring a chess teacher like NLCS has done, but more needs to be done to get girls to stick with chess, so they can eventually reach those high levels and become the role models that they never had.


Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
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