Participation explains gender differences in the proportion Chess grandmasters
Category: Gender
Posted on: January 30, 2007 12:06 PM, by Jake Young
We have had an ongoing discussion on this blog about whether the disparity between women and men in the sciences is the result of a innate difference in cognitive ability or the result of some social phenomena such as selective participation or discrimination. Unfortunately, one of the complexities of this debate is that there is really no good objective standard for how good a scientist is. You can look at publication rates and journal impact, but comparing these numbers across fields is difficult. We lack objective measures.
It would be interesting to look at an analogous system to science — something that requires lots of spatial and mathematical skill — but has objective measures. This system should also have a male: female disparity. Looking at this system we might be able to better understand why there are fewer women and apply this knowledge to science as an occupation.
With this in mind, Chabris and Glickman, publishing in the latest issue of the journal Psychological Science, have done a huge retrospective study using data from the 13 years of matches and players in the US Chess Federation.
The US Chess Federation has a ranking system whereby players are followed throughout their playing lives. This allows us to monitor how well boys versus girls are doing at their earliest years, how many of them stay involved or leave, and how many of them become grandmasters. Furthermore, the disparity issue is larger than in science — making this data set very interesting. Of the 894 Chess grandmasters in 2004, only 8 of them are women.
Click here to read the full article.
Chess does offer some ability to measure but there are way too many variables to get a scientific measurement. People are very complex machines.
I will always continue to believe that women can do just as well as men if they work at it in that particular field. However, we definitely raise our daughters differently than our sons. There is no way to do it the same for huge numbers of the public children. An individual family can do it but not a large population.
There is definitely a very large bias in the money and facilities that are given to boys education compared to the girls. Sometimes I think they separate them into boys and girls schools so they just do not have to spend the money on the girls. It is really a crime or more accurately a scandal.
For example in Concord Mass there is a boys school and a girls school. The boys Fenn school and the Girls Brooke school. The difference in money and facilities will blow your mind. The boys have everything the girls have nothing. This is by a factor of much more than 10 times more. Maybe 20 times more. The girls have bare essentials and the boys have way too much to ever be able to use. The boys also have a huge endowment.
Just check these 2 schools out in the same town. You will see.
“Of the 894 Chess grandmasters in 2004, only 8 of them are women.”
and three of the eight are Polgars !!!
This guy needed to interview Susan’s father!
About those schools in Massachussets, isn’t there some college called, “Harvard”? Didn’t that college recently loose a President over this kind of issue?
Part of the problem is this area is so permuated with political correctness. I wish people could discuss these kinds of issues more honestly and less judgementally.
I played the last swiss championship in october … there was about 200 players and I think that I saw just 4 girls/women … And 3 of them are part of our chess club.(We are 25.6 of them are girls)
If they are just 1 for each 50 of us…I understand very well why there are not more women GMs.
It is just a problem of numbers.
Borat has pretty scientific explanation on the subject :))
It is kind of trendy these days to suggest that environmental influences disadvantage girls in many endeavours. The truth is that there are genetic influences. IMHO a distinguishing feature of girls play during childhood is that it is more cooperative than competitive. The opposite is true of boys. These are probably genetic differences due to hormonal effects on brain development . I know it is not fashionable or politcally correct to say it these days, but the bottom line is that fewer girls play chess because they are less competitive in the approach to play in general. Of course, intelligence has nothing to do with it. Girls consistently outperform boys on most academic tasks during early childhood, and since when did we need intelligence to play chess anyway. I got to USCF 2200 without it.
I am checking right now other chess teams in our group(we are in 4th category in our federation-Catalonia,Spain-.About 6,500 players.One of each three spanish plays here).Each group has ten teams of ten boards(and there are a lot of groups)…and there is just one girl out of our team.
We play with three girls in our team,on boards 3,4 and 8, and they are rated 2010,1980 and 1865(two experts and one class A),but i understand we are not the usual club.
Why do we distinguish between girls and boys. Why do we say we are having a girls only tournament when women always want to be known as equals to boys/men. Why not just have mixed tournaments men and women only or boys and girls only. Having women/girls only tounaments makes it sound like women will never be as good at chess as men. Like we assume that by having women/girls only tournaments. Its a problem and I say just have no girls/women only tournaments. I don’t know of any men only chess tournaments !
I’ve always felt that the lack of strong women players was a pure numbers game. This article seems to confirm my thoughts on the subject.
Harvard University is another good example. Until recently Harvard was all male university with a huge financial endowment. The girls university was right next door and poor as can be. Finally recently Harvard was forced to merge the women’s college into Harvard. But I think they still keep the women’s college name. I am not sure it is fully equal.
No place has the financial investments that Harvard has. It is also impossible to enter Harvard unless your parents are graduates.
I know one very nice young man who got into Harvard. Both his mother and father are Harvard graduates. He married a Harvard graduate upon graduation. His present 2 children will easily enter Harvard.
I do not care how smart you are, you are not getting into college before his kids get in first.
It is all who you know and your ability to play politics. His parents were good at it and he is very good at it.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/01/17/summers_remarks_on_women_draw_fire/
By Marcella Bombardieri, Globe Staff | January 17, 2005
CAMBRIDGE — The president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, sparked an uproar at an academic conference Friday when he said that innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers. Summers also questioned how much of a role discrimination plays in the dearth of female professors in science and engineering at elite universities.
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Sign up for: Globe Headlines e-mail | Breaking News Alerts Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out on Summers’ talk, saying later that if she hadn’t left, ”I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.” Five other participants reached by the Globe, including Denice D. Denton, chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, also said they were deeply offended,
more to read full article.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/01/17/summers_remarks_on_women_draw_fire/
From that same Boston Globe article.
For example, she mentioned studies that indicate that women score higher on math tests if there are fewer men in the room while they are taking the test.
This might indicate a reason to have all female chess tournaments.
I run a chess club at an elementary school. Each meeting 15-20 kids show up. All but one or two are boys. Sometimes new girls come, but they see 18 boys and only one girl and don’t feel comfortable.
Chess seems to be a particularly competitive game. It also has a war/battle theme. Competition and battle attract more boys than girls, so there will naturally be more boys interested in the game than girls. Then, when more boys show up to play, the girls see that and are more inclined to stay away. There are certainly many, many girls that are interested in the game. “Girls-only” tournaments and other events make it less stressful for those interested girls to play. And that’s a fine and wonderful thing.
[And in school? Girls have been given tremendous advantages over boys in the past 20 years or so. The results are reflected in the college enrollment and performance numbers which are currently strongly skewed toward women (and getting worse).]
As a parent of chess playing kids (girl and boy), I see the difference first hand. for my son, his friends think it is cool that he is geeky and plays chess, for my daughter, her friends think it is uncool.
Fortunately my girl has a mind of her own and just keeps playing anyway!
In my travels to scholastic
tournaments, I’ve noticed that
the girls who are very strong players tend to come from chess families. It helps to have a brother and/or sister to travel with and it probably helps nullify the feeling that they’re the only girl competing.
I think girls’and womens’ events can be very useful though I don’t think they should be the only option. What I like about them is that the girls can be girls and not be overshadowed by the boys. It’s nice seeing all girls teams coming to the various girl’s nationals.
I’d like to see more of these type of events with an open section so that accompanying adult females can play also. I think it also encourages girls when they see adult women playing to know that one does not have to stop playing in tournaments just because they’ve graduated.
I know Susan’s February tournament in TX has an open section for women. I’m just disappointed that the tournament is the same weekend as the US Amateur Team. I’m playing in my 26th USAT.
I’ve taught some all girls classes for 1st graders. I’ve seen mixed results. I find often the girls are little too social, and don’t take the instruction quite as seriously as the boys do at that age. It’s a tough age in general.
Polly Wright
I’m afraid I don’t find the numbers explanation to be suffient enough by itself, at least when looking at top level chess.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure Judit Polgar is the only woman to EVER break into the top 100 players. Obviously there were a lot of barriers against women throughout history, but there haven’t been barriers for women in chess for several decades.
I’m not sure how many different people have dipped into the top 100 rankings over that time, but suffice to say that it is several hundred people. And yet only one women has made it in.
I’m sure that men participate in chess more than women, but I do not believe they participate more than 500 times (or more) than women!
There must be other factors.
I also broke the top 100 FIDE list when I was active in the 90’s. My highest ranking on the PCA list was in the top 60.
Judit was the only woman to break the top 10.
Best wishes,
Susan Polgar
http://www.PolgarChess.com
“Finally recently Harvard was forced to merge the women’s college into Harvard. But I think they still keep the women’s college name. I am not sure it is fully equal.”
What happens with women who go to Harvard is that they get a diploma from Harvard and also a diploma from Radcliffe (the women’s college) when they graduate. Men only get a diploma from Harvard when they graduate.
Finally recently Harvard was forced to merge the women’s college into Harvard. But I think they still keep the women’s college name. I am not sure it is fully equal.
Ugh, I guess that all depends on what you mean by “recently.”
Harvad began join insturction in 1943, in 63 all Radcliffe graduates got a Harvad diploma and in 1977 women entering Radcliffe were put entirely into Harvard.
So if “recently” means 30 years ago, okay.
I don’t believe that Harvard was “forced” to do anything, the two colleges just merged. It happened in a lot of other places. But It wasn’t like illegal to have an all women’s college in 77 or anything.
I think a PDF of the original research by Chabris and Glickman is available from here:
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Chabris2006b.pdf
It includes also a table showing how girls’ % decreases with age:
Age (years) Percentage female
age %
5-15 17.0%
15–25 11.9%
25–35 4.9%
35–45 2.2%
45–55 2.0%
55–65 2.2%
65–75 2.0%
75–85 2.1%
85–95 2.5%
I live down the road from the Fenn school in Concord Massachusetts. It is a boys school, sure enough — a private school for boys. I never heard of the Brooke school, and I couldn’t find it in Google. Assuming it exists, you can’t make a point about relative resources for boys and girls and education based on comparing two private schools in Concord Massachusetts. The Fenn school has a lot of resources, no doubt, because parents with a lot of money send their boys there and the tuition is comparable to college. It has more resources than more than 99% of schools in the entire country. Two other private schools in Concord, the Concord Academy and Middelsex Academy are even wealthier than Fenn, and those are co-ed. (Indeed Concord Academy was originally a girls school and is still has more more girls than boys.) These Concord private schools and their resources say more about class and wealth than they do about gender.
I read this article some time ago. The basic finding is that there are more male grandmasters than female because there are more male masters than female, more male experts than female, and so on, *at every level*, including the level of children beginning chess. The number of high-performing women in chess is consistent with the number of women in chess.
They investigated two other things.
First they randomly paired boys and girls starting out in the rating system and followed their progress. The girls did as well as the boys.
Second, they looked at the very small number of places in the country where there are as many girls entering chess as there are boys. One such place is Oakland, California. In those rare places, there are as many girls in the top ranks as there are boys.
The study does not address the issue as to why fewer girls than boys enter chess as children. This is obviously the key issue.
My personal opinion as to the reason is that little boys are on the whole obnoxious when they are involved in competition. Parents do too good a job in socializing their girls and not good enough a job socializing the boys, with the result that the girls prefer not to compete with obnoxious little boys.
A second reason is that many parents still think chess is for boys.
@anonymous 8:12 A.M.
I agree with you on most of those points (not sure about the ‘boys being obnoxious’ part). In particular, I believe it is obvious that stereotypes of chess have been perpetuated, and will continue to be until the chess community takes a proactive approach in educating people, specifically on the equality of men and women in chess.
The difference between a man and a woman is that little Y chromosome, and though that affects physical aspects, there is no reason to believe that one sex is mentally superior to the other. The only thing lacking is opportunity. We live in a male-dominated world and some men are reluctant to admit that there are women that may simply be better at things than them. (go to http://www.youtube.com, look up Korchnoi, and watch his reaction when Sofia Polgar beats him). Only time and effort will change people’s views.
The other phenomenon is that girls drop out of organized, rated, chess at a faster rate. The sexist explanation of this is that they drop out because they are not as good at the game as males, in general. But the other findings of the study show that this is not true.
Of course, boys drop out also, and, at least in the United States, most scholastic chess players don’t end up competing in tournaments or joining chess clubs as adults. But the girls drop out much faster.
In Massachusetts, you only have to go to a State Scholastic Championship qualifier to see this. In one recent such event, in the 8-and-Under and 11-and-Under sections there were perhaps 20-25 competitors in each and maybe 15% of them were girls. In the high school section, there were about eight competitors, all boys.
I help out in a scholastic chess club for kids in grades 1 through 4 at the local school. Out of 70 kids who are signed up, 12 are girls, and all of those are in the 1st through 3rd grades. By the time you get to 4th grade, there are no girls.
Korchnoi’s reaction to losing a blitz game to Sofia Polgar is very reminiscent of the reaction I see regularly from these little boys.
There is one little boy who is about the same level as my daughter, and they’ve been playing with each other for most of the school year. Unbeknownst to the kids, the adults are keeping track of the results, so as to be able to pair kids with other kids of like ability. So, I happen to know my daughter beats this boy a bit more than half the time.
At the latest meeting, my daughter lost the game, and one of the adults who was watching, trying to encourage her, said, “Oh, well, that was a good game; you’re pretty evenly matched and this time you lost…”. To which, the little boy, obviously insulted by the notion that he had ever “lost to a girl”, said insistently, “She’s *NEVER* beaten me.”
Is it any wonder that little girls don’t want to play chess with little boys? They have to brave being thought weird by their girlfriends, and their victories are not only not recognized or respected by the little boys, they are denied.
This comment has been removed by the author.
So many bigoted statements on this thread!
E.g.: “We live in a male-dominated world and some men are reluctant to admit that there are women that may simply be better at things than them. (go to http://www.youtube.com, look up Korchnoi, and watch his reaction when Sofia Polgar beats him)”
It is rather nasty to so quickly attribute base motives to someone when you have no idea what they are thinking. Korchnoi was one of the very top players in the world for a long time and is still some 200 ELO points higher rated than Sofia. I’m sure he was embarrassed and irritated at losing to someone whom he should regularly beat. The video gives absolutely no justification for a hair-trigger condemnation of his motives as sexist.
E.g.: “To which, the little boy, obviously insulted by the notion that he had ever ‘lost to a girl’, said insistently, ‘She’s *NEVER* beaten me.'”
“Obviously”?! That’s a pretty quick judgement.
I hear comments like that from little boys regardless of who beats them, whether it is a boy or a girl. Many boys have enormous but fragile egos. They love to win, hate to lose, and find it hard to admit it when they lose (and easy to forget afterwards). From what I’ve seen, it doesn’t matter whether they lose to a boy or a girl, a 2nd grader or a high schooler–so many boys really don’t like losing and react negatively when they do!
E.g.: “Korchnoi’s reaction to losing a blitz game to Sofia Polgar is very reminiscent of the reaction I see regularly from these little boys.”
Yes, I see that reaction regularly from little boys too. But there really is no correlation with the gender of the person that beats them. The boys I see in tournaments have just as much respect for the girls as for the other boys. They seem to pay much more attention to ratings than gender.
Ok, if you are saying is that the little boys aren’t just obnoxious to the little girls when they lose, but to everybody, then I am not sure how far you get with that argument, if the end result is that girls are not attracted to chess because of the hyper-competitiveness of boys.
It seems to me that the basic problem is that in chess, as in many other areas, girls get the message that it isn’t feminine to compete, especially with boys. Competitiveness in boys is regarded as normal, and obnoxious hyper-competitiveness isn’t uncommon and is excused or seen as “fighting spirit” which needs to be channeled. The same behavior from girls would be both surprising, would not be excused, and would not be regarded as “fighting spirit”, etc.
The result is that the girls don’t compete, and those that do, mostly drop out.
It isn’t a question of ability: it is a question of how competitiveness is encouraged (or not) in boys versus girls — by parents, by teachers, and by peers.
Chess is just a game, and in the overall scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter whether it is dominated by males or not. But, unfortunately, the same thing occurs in arenas that are important.
While there may be slight innate differences in certain aptitudes, in terms of educational performance, for example, the higher average performance of males in math, vs. the higher performance of females in language and communications, a few years ago a researcher found that in home schooled children, the average test scores were much higher and the gender, parental income, parental educational levels, and also ethnic differences in educational performance in all subjects were much, much smaller than they are in children in the public schools. The Home School Legal Defense Association (the HSLDA,) had at one time a link to the researcher’s site. I believe it would be fair to say that the implication of the research findings was that tailoring the curriculum and presentation of the subjects more tightly to the child’s achievement level, learning style and interests than can be done in a group educational environment allowed much more scope for the child to learn, even in subjects where you would expect a particular group to excel. The most stunning part of the findings to me was that children home schooled for five years were averaging in the top ten percent of national standardized tests for essentially all subjects. I believe the findings of that study would support the proposition that women certainly can a a group do math, science, whatever, including chess! We guys can write and communicate. All it takes is finding a way to really reach the child’s mind, and perhaps avoid negative academic peer pressures.
The paper cited seems to present overwhelming evidence that boys are innately better at chess than girls, then somehow reaches a politically correct conclusion based on very scanty evidence that, if only girls would participate more, they would do better.
Logically, we would expect the opposite. If girls are discouraged from playing chess because it’s not girly (although why people think chess is somehow not girly is beyond me–it’s not a manly activity like football), then we would expect to find that only the best girl chess players would participate, and we would then expect that girls would actually do better than boys in the rankings becuase the girl players would more likely come from the top of the girl-distribution. But instead we see the opposite.