Originally published for my monthly on www.ChessCafe.com in March 2006
The Difference Between Boys and Girls in Chess
Can female players be as good in chess as male players?
The answer to the above question is, “yes.”
But then how come very few female players can compete on the same level as their male counterpart? That is the $64,000 question, yet it seems that very few people are concerned about finding the answer. I will discuss the reasons for this and then I will offer my solutions for change.
Social Acceptance
In general, society does not encourage or really accept the concept of girls playing chess. That makes it difficult to get girls involved in chess and even more difficult to maintain their interest.
Family Acceptance
There is also little family acceptance for girls playing chess. Many parents do not really understand or play chess well themselves. Some do not understand the benefits of their daughters playing chess. Therefore, if the girls are not encouraged to play chess, it is more natural for them not to play at all or to abandon it quickly.
This is similar to the stereotype of boys playing with cars and trucks, while girls play with Barbie dolls. Boys don’t play with Barbie dolls because it is generally considered a girl thing. Many parents consider chess as a boy thing.
Opportunities
This point directly links to the social and family acceptance issues. Because of the lack of family and social acceptance, fewer parents actually invest the time and money to encourage their daughters to play chess. And the lack of encouragement or assistance directly leads to fewer girls taking chess seriously.
Intimidation
Because the ratio between girls and boys at tournaments are so skewed (9 to 1 boys vs. girls), girls often get very intimidated. And because girls have fewer opportunities to learn and play it leads to poor results, which leads to discouragement and eventually they quit. In addition, boys are usually much more rough and competitive; many girls are teased and rather than fighting back, they just don’t come back.
Different approach to the game
Boys and girls approach the game of chess very differently. Most boys are results-oriented and focus on winning and losing.
Girls are very different; they have a greater appreciation for the artistic and social aspect of chess. The problem we face is that most people expect girls to learn the game and enjoy it the same way as boys do. They don’t, and we as educators, parents or coaches need to understand this. If we do not recognize this differences in how boys and girls approach the game, how can we find a solution to fix it?
Different interest
If we want to keep girls in chess, we must keep the girls interested in the game. We must find out what makes chess fun for the girls and what motivates them to maintain their interest.
Physiological and Physical differences
As they get older, girls tend to develop faster in many ways. They develop different interests and are often treated differently; they also have different social problems. It is not easy being the “only” female player at a tournament. Many older girls have to fend off unwanted advances and are often subjected to inappropriate remarks.
Being chess pioneers, my sisters and I faced many of these issues while competing in a male dominated chess environment. No female player is immune to this. But I was able to focus on my chess because I was encouraged and supported by my parents, and I was given the opportunities to learn and compete in chess. Chess
Development and Improvement
We do not have specialized chess development and improvement courses geared towards girls, something that addresses the differences between boys and girls approach to the game. The same goes with chess camps or chess classes. The activities and methods of teaching chess are more orientated for boys than girls.
Different standard and expectation
A chess rating is just number that measures the competitive success of a player. Yet, as I mentioned above, girls are much less competitive than boys. So if everything revolves around ratings, can we expect the same success in girls?
Career Longevity
Female players often must interrupt their careers in order to raise a family.
Solutions
Now I will offer some of my solutions to the above problems.
Through my numerous experiences with thousands of young female players and their parents across the country, I discovered that girls do need and want a separate chess environment in which they are comfortable. Only in such an environment can you encourage more girls to stay, play and learn chess at a much higher ratio and level. This would give them a chance to advance and catch up with the boys.
According to the statistics from the USCF, our federation is losing girls at an alarming rate after 3rd and 4th grade. For years the USCF has been unable to correct this problem on its own. I was asked to try and reverse this trend and my solutions have been to:
* Create more fun and exciting events for girls to motivate them to stay in chess longer
* Create a better atmosphere so young girls will be less intimidated
* Create activities that girls would enjoy and appreciate more
* Create more college scholarships as an incentive for girls to achieve better results
* Create a free training program to help the more serious and more talented girls excel to be top-level players
* And much more…
All of the above initiatives have been funded by the Susan Polgar Foundation.
My idea has always been that the more girls who successfully play chess, the more motivated they will be to remain in chess, which will increase the amount of good players. It’s all about the numbers.
The Susan Polgar National Invitational for Girls, in only its second year, had more participants than the Denker Tournament of High School Champions, which has been around for over two decades. We awarded $155,000 in scholarships (from UTD), prizes and stipends without any funding from the USCF.
The recently concluded Susan Polgar National Open Championship for Girls in Corpus Christi, Texas had 212 participants and we awarded laptops computers, chess scholarships to Texas Tech University and countless other prizes. This shows that girls do want to compete if they are given the opportunity.
Now, I would like to announce a new initiative that was suggested by a member of the USCF Scholastic Council:
The program is the Susan Polgar All-Stars Girl’s Chess Team. Its goal is to recognize girls who already excel in chess and it to serve as a motivational tool for others. All girls who qualify for the team will be nationally recognized, they will receive a special Susan Polgar All-Stars jacket, a special All-Stars Certificate, and an invitation to the exclusive and intensive Susan Polgar All-Stars Girl’s Training Program conducted by me personally, similar to the historic 2004 US Women’s Olympiad Training Program that I created.
This program will greatly assist them in improving their chess skills. Below are the tentative criteria for the Susan Polgar All-Stars Girl’s Team:
Age Minimum Peak Rating
8 & Under 1500
9 1600
10 1700
11 1800
12 1900
13 2000
14 2100
15 2150
16 2200
17 2250
18 2300
In addition, any girl who is within 50 points from the above criteria can apply for special exemptions to attend this exclusive training program. It will not be an easy task for girls to qualify for the Susan Polgar All-Stars Girl’s Chess Team.
There is no stopping any young female player from qualifying for another award such as the Trophies Plus All- America’s Chess Team. They can qualify and accept either award or both, it is entirely up to the players who earned it.
Therefore, we are not offending any individual young female players. This is a non-profit initiative to help the USCF and young female players in the United States. As I mentioned above, girls are dropping out at an alarming rate. We need to reverse this trend before we can expect to produce large numbers of good female players.
To insist on keeping the same system in dealing with girls is simply irresponsible. Standing still and not doing anything is simply unacceptable to me.
Susan – – – you are truly a great force in the universe. Hold steady your insightful vision, maintain your remarkable focus and you can achieve many wondrous things.
Thanks in advance,
AL from Brooklyn, New York
This is the best ever article about girls in chess. Awesome!
Very thoughtful article!!
Susan,
I understand everything you say, I would agree that girls don’t have the opportunity that boys have in the chess world. However, female brains are known to work differently to male brains. Is not reasonable to say that perhaps male brains are just better suited to the game of chess? I in no way mean to be sexist, but for me this seems to be the only explanation for such a difference in ratings between the top women and men in the world.
You hit the issues right one the head! Well done Susan!
I respectfully disagree. If girls really wanted to be a part of it their would be an equitable amount of girls on-line chess. Where their is very little gender bios or even knowledge of who your opponent is. From their if they got great results it would be obvious and they would be able to make the minor jump to tournament play. I think it is more of interest thing and skill. If you get awesome results all the time your interest is going to go way up. Combined with men tend to be more mathmatically inclined and problem solving oriented. Which chess tends to have a ton of problems.
Alex: There is a recent article by a Harvard researcher that addresses this issue in the journal, Psychological Science. The authors conclude “that the greater number of men at the highest levels in chess can be explained by the greater number of boys who enter chess at the lowest levels.” I don’t know if the article is available on line but maybe someone else can provide a link.
I think the major difference is that Chess is an aggressive violent game. It symbolizes a war, you know…
Most boys like these things. Girls have other interests (most of them)
>>In general, society does not encourage or really accept the concept of girls playing chess.>>
Does it encourage even boys playing chess? Chess players are still regarded as rather odd by the public at large, and people like Fischer have done nothing to discourage that view.
Susan: You rock as usual. This is a great article and a great proposal. I might take issue with the idea that boys are more interested in winning and girls are more interested in the artistic/nuanced side of chess. My 9 year-old daughter is just as interested in winning as any of the boys she competes against. Maybe that is because her dad and I have told her that it’s okay to win, especially against boys. I have a feeling that some parents are ambivalent about this issue and that they transfer that ambivalence to their daughters. I think it is an issue of socialization rather than of being hardwired from birth.
I agree with Alex. Maybe boys’ brains are better for chess and girls’ brains are better for other things. Maybe it is not as easy to spot the difference as it is to find out that boys are faster than girls on a running track. The elite women athletes run better than most men, but they cannot compete with the elite men athletes. Then women are better than men at extremely high endurence sports (very long distance running, for distances far longer than a marathon). It is possible that the difference in chess is not so clear, but I believe there is some difference. If men and women have different muscular qualities, why cannot they have different brain qualities?
Regarding nyc chess mom’s comment that there is a larger number of boys entering at the lowest levels, could the difference in boys/girls brains cause more boys to start chess? If someone is a fast runner, there is a larger probability that he starts running.
Indeed the intimidation and unwanted advances are rampant. It seems you can’t post a picture of yourself on your blog without someone making a clumsy pass.
My favorite explanation came from GM Maurice Ashley, quoting someone else: “Girls don’t have a subconscious desire to kill their fathers”.
What a timely article. Just in the past few days, I have fielded a number of calls from mothers of girls in kindergarten who love chess but have been put off by their first tournament experience. One mother said that her daughter was wondering why there were so many boys and so few girls. Another mother said that her daughter was intimidated by the pushing and shoving of the boys, whether on their way into the tournament room or to go up to receive trophies. My daughter is one of two girls in her grade at school who still play chess in 3rd grade. She recently played in a tournament where one of her male opponents elbowed her hard enough after she won the game that she had a bruise for a week. She laughed it off but I’m sure girls with thinner skin would not. So I think Susan’s proposals are very much needed and I applaud her for starting this dialogue.
I am the anon who posted at 10:43:00 AM. Just a clarification. When saying that girls’ and boys’ brains are not equally good for chess, I do not necessarily mean that girls are not as intelligent as boys, or that girls brains are not as suitable to evaluate and to calculate chess positions. If the difference lies in the motivation, that would still be enough to cause a difference in performance.
nyc chess mom, that type of bad behavior (elbowing) may be used against boys who beat that opponent as well. Using the same reasoning I might suggest that intelligent players do not play chess, because they tend to be more focused on mind activities than on their physical abilities, and so are more vulnerable to pushing and shoving.
Citing the aforementioned Psychological Science article, the authors found that “a)the ratings of men are higher on average than those of women, but no more variable; (b) matched boys and girls improve and drop out at equal rates, but boys begin chess competition in greater numbers and at higher performance levels than girls; and c) in locales where at least 50% of the new young players are girls, their initial ratings are not lower than those of boys.” I think the last conclusion may be the most significant.
On the elbowing issue, I would suggest that elbowing is behavior that boys are used to from the rough and tumble of their normal play on athletic fields/courts and recess. For most girls, it is not and I do think that it can help perpetuate the myth that chess is an activity for boys. We went to the All Girls Nationals in Chicago last year and they drew lots to see who would participate in the simul with Garry Kasparov in addition to the previous tournament winners. The TD passed around a box with the girls names and randomly asked one girl to pick one name and then another to pick another name, etc. The girls stood calmly as the box was passed. There was no pushing, shoving or jumping up and down shouting “me, me, me, pick me, pick me.” Every parent there agreed that this was unique to an all girls’ tournament.
Excellent article.
I have found that girls and boys do take a different approach to the game. I’ve taught several all girls classes to first graders. The discipline issues with girls is different then I’ve found with boys of the same age. Usually I have get the girls to stop talking so much while they’re playing. The boys I have get them to stop talking, but I also have to get them to not talk trash to their opponent or to another player sitting near by. The boys also tend to push and shove to be the first one to get a set and board.
Girls tend to be better sports then the boys. Both genders do like to count up the points at the end and declare that they won. Though I do find the boys make a bigger deal out of it.
I do find that in classes where I have a good mix of girls and boys, that they still tend to want to play their own gender. If I assign match ups and have a girl playing a boy, it’s generally the boys moaning about having to play a girl.
In most of my classes the boys know better then to say that they’re better then the girls. Though over the years I’ve had few girls that were close to being the best in a class. For the most part the top player in a class was a boy.
Generally it is not in a female’s interest to be competitive in a chess because it limits her relationship possibilities within the social group both male and female.
My observations inidcate females tend not to make freinds with intense female competitive rivals.
Males in general like to be dominant in competitive activities against their feamle partners.
For most people social relationships are far more important than chess.
This is a fantastic article!
“Girls are very different; they have a greater appreciation for the artistic and social aspect of chess.”
As a female I have to seriously disagree. I play because I ENJOY beating all the guys! I’m not there to make friends, I’m there to win.
When I meet females in higher brackets than me I don’t want to be their friend I want to be better than them… and come back the next year to beat them as well.
Chess is competition, not a tea social. Point out the competitive side and the brain boost from solving problems and gaining more athletic females shouldn’t be a problem. They’re competitive too.
So what? That’s you. That’s not how most girls are. The problem why the USCF keeps on failing is they make policies based on one person’s opinion instead of doing thorough research for 5 years like Susan Polgar
“So what? That’s you. That’s not how most girls are.”
No. The whole “be friends with everyone” is how females are taught to be. We’re not taught to be competitive because it isn’t “nice”. Or if you beat the boys they won’t want to date you.
Stereotypes are keeping girls from realizing their potential. Tell them the truth. 1. You can beat all the boys at chess and still find someone to date and 2. you can focus on chess or a career and still have a family too (Susan and Judit have managed to do both successfully).
As was mentioned earlier for MOST people the social aspects of any sport are as important if not more so than the competitive aspects.
If you are going to dedicate the amount of time to chess required to be a serious player, then you will have little time to build up social relationships outside of that group.
I am involved in judo at a National level, and whilst the competition is feirce, definately not a “tea social”, for MOST participants judo is not just about competition but is a way of life, the majority of there soical life also revolves around judo too. I guess chess would be the same, at higher levels where serious amount of time is dedicated to chess.
So if you are going to increase the numbers of women in chess at an elite level you need to make a better social atmosphere for women.
Of course there are the exceptions who can either perserve despite the social climate, or those who leave their social interactions outside chess and are only interested in the competitive aspect. But if you do not address the social atmosphere you miss out on a huge target market.
“You can beat all the boys at chess and still find someone to date and 2. you can focus on chess or a career and still have a family too”
No one is saying you can’t they are just saying more barriers exist for women to do this than men, it is all about breaking down the barriers (or finding ways around them).