Women are just as good at chess as men – but they just don’t like game, says Oxford study
Men do not dominate chess competitions because they are better at the game but simply because women do not like it, according to an Oxford University study.
By Stephen Adams
Last Updated: 2:36PM GMT
27 Jan 2009
The lack of women who have broken into the top ranks of chess players is almost purely because so few of them play, academics found.
Researchers at the university’s Department of Experimental Psychology discovered that 96 per cent of the difference in performance can be accounted for by the vastly greater numbers of men who play.
They made their conclusions after analysing results from just over 120,000 members of the German Chess Federation, in which men outnumber women by 16:1.
Using a points-based scoring system, they found that men only slightly outperformed women.
Research team member Merim Bilalic, author of ‘Does Chess Need Intelligence?’, said: “Although the performance of the 100 best German male chess players is better than that of the 100 best German women, we show that 96 percent of the observed difference is down to the fact a greater number of men play chess. There is little left for biological or cultural explanations to account for.”
Gerry Wade, president of the English Chess Federation, thought the conclusions were “absolutely right”.
He said: “At primary school level, when there are an equal number of boys and girls playing, there’s a level playing field.”
Britain’s top ranked women’s player Ketevan Arakhamia-Grant only missed out on last year’s British Open titled by a single game, he said.
There has never been a female open world chess champion, nor a female British Open champion.
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk
Very interesting research. It does make sense.
Bull crap – pure PC
At the highest and lowest ends of the Bell curve for intelligence – men dominate.
This fact is extremely well documented.
There are simply more male idiots and super GMs than women.
Now the followup question for the researchers is to compare the player-pool sizes for international chess () today and () in 1970. Then answer what distribution D of Elo ratings one would expect today, based on extrapolating the spread of ratings in 1970 to the player pool of today.
My own prior expectations are that the extrapolation would predict a half-dozen players to maintain ratings over 2850. That hasn’t happened—they keep bumping up against 2800. And it would predict even more above 2700 than we see today.
My own work—now that I’ve patched a hole from last summer though it’s still in very preliminary stages—has just started hinting that the #s bear out Kasparov’s opinions that the quality of play (especially defense) has improved since the 1970s. I’m giving a departmental colloquium on this at the University of Montreal this Thursday (scroll down for abstract), but will not have a circulatable draft paper for some time yet. Anyway, apart from my work, my point here is that the population-comparison methods used in the paper should be applied to 1970 vs. today and might corroborate my conclusions independently—have they?
lol
chess strength is NOT a measure of intelligence. but if women had the same distributions as men do (just outnumbered 16:1) there should have bben 4 women in top 100. In reality Judith is the only one, and Vera F. Menchik was the previous one.
time for affirmative action in chess
I just made doody in my pants.
Men are the most intelligent of all!
I have proof of it right here!
Click to see intelligent man
Women are just as good at chess as men – but they just don’t like game
Do they offer proof for the first half of this claim ?
The second poster is right. The claim of “we’re less overall, thus we have less outstanding players” presumes equal standard deviation for both distributions. And, as the poster indicates, a certain gene present in the X of the 23rd chromosome, makes extreme morons and extreme geniuses more likely among males.
It’s funny how all these researchers focus on statistic details, instead of looking at the big picture: women dont’ care about most of intellectual activities – chess, math, science in general, politics… they prefer looking at themselves in mirrors. That’s all.