Why are there even men’s and women’s chess events? Are our brains so different that we can’t play chess against each other? As a layperson that sounds nuts. Also, I heard that at the next world swimming championships there’ll be an “open” category which will accept anybody. I suspect that this will increasingly become a thing in certain competitive events.
Not men's and women's events, open and women's. Women's events were instituted to help attract and keep girls and women playing. They tend to drop out at a certain age because of a negative environment.
For online only events: because otherwise many of the would-be contender women won't even bother because there is no way they're going to get close to the top.
Chess is still very much male dominated, there are more and more women players but they are still a small minority compared to the number of men. Out of about 2000 GMs 40(!) are women.
I believe Hou Yifan is the world top female player and she's at
So it makes perfect sense to have women only contests and it also makes perfect sense to allow the women that want to to compete with the men (for ELO reasons alone).
Plainly, to give women a chance in a field that is excessively male-dominated for systemic reasons. Not saying this was a good or bad idea.
Not that women are less capable than men at playing chess, but boys were historically way more encouraged than girls to partake in "intellectual" activities such as learning, playing, and mastering chess. Obviously the end result is that you get way more men than women that are good at chess. It's a bit like noticing that the most impactful people in the history of science were (mostly) men. Men are not inherently smarter, but it's a bit easier to do stuff when you can get yourself an education instead of getting married at 20 and raising the kids.
Women are get more degrees than men nearly everywhere in the west, hardly anybody gets married before 25, where are all the GMs?
(I'm not disputing that there may be systemic factors keeping women out of chess or holding them back from performing at higher levels but the reasons you highlighted don't seem like the right ones).
For starters, not everybody has a supportive set of parents that would encourage their daughters to go and play chess, which is still - unfortunately - seen as a 'boys thing'.
The Botez sisters are probably the most visible advocates of women chess right now and that's because their father was very supportive.
But they already had their share of sexism and misogyny directed at them.
And that gets us to point 2: even if you have a supportive family, the kind of crap you will encounter might well put you off your chess career. Nobody likes to be harassed.
So then it becomes a numbers game: out of 1,000,000 men and 1,000,000 women say the original distribution of the talents required for chess are evenly distributed, pretty much all of the men interested in the game will find support and their chances of being harassed are slim. Most of them will rise to their level of competence. But for the women it is different. The vast bulk will never make it through the first filter, and if they do they will have to run a gauntlet to get to the point where they have enough of a rating to get some visibility and more support in the form of coaching. So only a fraction of them will rise to their level of competence. And that fraction is so incredibly small (about 1:50) that the chances of throwing out the female world champion approach certainty. 98% of the female talent in chess never gets enough of a chance. They either lack early support or they end up being discouraged later on by incidents.
I'm still not sure! But I could absolutely believe it, it's plausible.
A good explanation should account for the fact that Russia and China produce proportionally more female GMs. I wonder if the level of toxicity / harassment experienced by female players is any different in those countries or to what degree parents are more supportive of their daughters learning chess.
The state there is more supportive. Kids are tested and if they show promise in some sports domain that gets full power behind it because that is international prestige.
From this point of view GMs are made by a system that provides high quality coaching and training. You can't do it by yourself! and that this system is not providing adequate support to girls and women.
I can believe that.
I think I was ascribing too much weight to personal agency in the novice -> GM pipeline.
It is like any other sport in that sense, a completely isolated genius without access to books and coaching is not going to automatically become a GM, it starts with family support, then club support and finally individual support from other top level players, and sometimes former players, and some form of sponsoring or personal wealth to free up your time. This is instrumental in becoming really good, beyond a mid level ELO rating. I was pretty fanatical about chess until 17 or so, had a friend who was totally immersed in chess and I had a neighbor at my dads place who was a very strong player (master iirc, who I only beat once at the ripe old age of 8 or so but it completely blew his mind :) ).
My school friend is still active ( https://ratings.fide.com/profile/1001396, 2223 ELO rating) and in spite of dedicating a lifetime to chess his highest ranking was 2376 (which is extremely good), he never even got to 'grand master' and he's the strongest player that I've played regularly as a kid.
But I realized that I would have to choose: technology, music or chess and technology won out because it seemed to have the biggest potential for generating income. Chess always was just a game to me, I never wanted to study opening books (which I considered cheating, what's the point in memorizing a whole raft of openings, I still believe you're supposed to pit your wits against your opponent, not to memorize 100's of standard openings that you did not come up with yourself and that is table stakes), so I tuned out. But for a year or so I felt that vibe and was really in love with the game. Fortunately Arno was much stronger than I was so he did me a great service (and I was his punchbag which helped him train his opening repertoire). I think we did 20:1 or worse in win rate but when I won it felt pretty sweet.
Chess is super intense. And if you want to be any good at all you need every little advantage. For the top (anybody ranked Fide master or above) chess is your life as long as you are active.
I don't see the structural issues, dad's not being supportive is not structural. Sexism could be, but it's everywhere my experience of the chess community is that it's less than say for women's football.
What you see or do not see doesn't really matter all that much, what matters is that almost all of the top players in chess (and in any sports, really) come from supportive environments besides having won the genetic lottery in one way or another.
And if you think that the sexism is less in the chess community than in women's football I'm going to have to part with saying that I wished that I had evidence that that is the case but unfortunately it isn't. The chess world is - alas - no better than any other sport in this respect and that alone makes a good case for having a women's league, when you're doing something at the top of your abilities the last thing you need is to have that sort of thing on your mind to keep you off your best game.
Note that there are other sports where the risks to female participants and sexism are off the scale compared to both chess and women's football (properly: women's soccer in English but never mind that) such as gymnastics.
Ultimately seems everyone agrees a women's category is helpful.
The question is should transwomen be allowed in? I can see the argument for excluding them there appears little value as they can compete fairly in the Open category.
I don't think there is any benefit to the women's category to allow transwomen join.
I think transwomen see they being allowed in as beneficial to themselves.
It is a very tricky problem and it lays bare a lot of the societal issues around trans people.
For instance, one problem here is that if a person that grows up as a boy transitions as a teen and they've been into chess since childhood that would already give them a massive advantage compared to the rest of the women in the competition because of the advantage that men have if they want to go into professional level chess. A girl born as a girl would have to fight for that much, much harder and this would go at the expense of their eventual rating. Chess, like playing the violin is usually - but not always, there are also late-bloomers - is a thing where the foundation is laid when you are very young, think five or six and then with a steady progression in level and coaching as you get older until you reach your peak.
I'm not sure what the answer is. I'm super sympathetic to trans rights but I would like to see a more constructive approach where this stuff is worked out in dialogue and with reason rather than just to see a focus on 'rights'. It is a game and a career and being able to switch from one side to the other can give an unfair advantage, something that trans women would have to be aware of, and that given that sport is first and foremost about fairness rather than winning should lead to some kind of compromise where everybody agrees that the new setup is a fair one and which aims for maximum inclusivity.
That is an important observation: sport is multiple things at once to different people.
For some people it is their career, for some it is entertainment, for some it is a business (sometimes a huge one) and for some it is all about personal achievement or fame or prestige (in a more institutional setting, say the olympics or a world championship). These are not mutually exclusive and the matrix of combinations and goals is very complex and not at all aligned. Cheaters are a factor (doping, using computers during online chess games, trying to hobble competitors) as are the stakes that a competition is for.
Between all of those it is already a minefield before you bring in supposedly clear cut things such as human rights. But it never is clear cut in practice.
One of the main arguments in the broader sports realm against trans women participating in women's divisions pertains to physical advantages due to testosterone levels and other physiological differences. This argument doesn't hold water here.
At face value it seems silly to have gender specific events, but I guess a valid reason might be to encourage participation.
It's for participation, much of the world has very strong women players. But not strong enough to do them justice in the open league.
There might be brain differences that account for this a controversial one I've seen argued is that some autistic traits can be useful for chess training and men then to have those traits in greater numbers.
That argument was made jokingly at a college chess club by one of the women, but given the overlap between autism and transgenderism I wonder if it's amplified?
There's an argument to be made that ASD suffers from a severe selection bias wrt gender, and that its high incidence in late-transitioning women is actually the true base rate.
Is the hypothesis that ASD is only over represented in male to female transitioners and do so younger but when all those have transitioned are considered there is no over representation of ASD?
It make be hard to pick apart since ASD male to female rates are so lopsided.
The hypothesis is that ASD is severely underdiagnosed in those presenting female, and most often diagnosed in childhood or adolescence. Hence most late-transitioning women have a diagnosis from when their practitioner thought they were male.
I think it's well established that there are more autistic men than autistic women.
At least to the point that I wouldn't challenge it with ideology alone.
There is an awkwardness here. If transwomen didnt choose to feel like women we must accept it as a neurodovergent condition, why would there not be coexistence with other meurodovergent conditions?
Indeed, why not? But overmedicalizing transness does nobody any good.
I'm going to be honest with you, I don't really think this is a problem that needs solving. I haven't heard of a single trans GM, unlike the situation in powerlifting, cycling, etc. FIDE is infamously corrupt and this reeks to me of politics. It's also not hard to notice that it's mostly run by Eastern Europeans, usually from former Soviet satellite states, which have as a rule a dim opinion of trans people.
I raised two special-needs sons who likely qualify for a diagnosis of ASD but never got a formal diagnosis because I homeschooling them, so I didn't need an official diagnosis to accommodate their needs.
Human children are raised for many years and a large part of social stuff is learned behavior. Some things can be explicitly taught to people whose brain wiring disinclined them to innately pick it up on their own.
Girls are socialized differently from boys and it seems likely they are just expected to "get" social things even if they don't. They either get someone to explain it or they try harder than boys to cover up their deficits because it's more socially unacceptable.
Not everything can be taught. Some social difficulties can be rooted in things like a lack of prosody or lack of ability to tone match can be extreme priblematic and cannot be fixed, at least not that I know of.
But some things can be explained and to whatever degree it's learnable, if girls are simply more expected than boys to learn it, it's not unreasonable to suggest ASD is likely underdiagnosed in girls.
If this were true we'd still need to explain why there's about 5:1 ratio of severely autistic men vs women.
Bringing in milder autism we can dilute that down to about 4:1 maybe 3:1.
But why? Why are we positing unproven theories to discount the data? That's not good science. Trying to explain data is.
Simon Baron-Cohen the works foremost autism specialist (a clinical psychologist and cousin to Ali G Sacha Baron-Cohen). Put forwards the "extreme male" brain theory (now called emoaphising-systemising theory to avoid gendered language) theory of autism and it's pretty compelling.
I'm not suggesting it necessarily accounts for the entire difference. You said you were interested. I shared what I know.
If you were not interested and just want to double down on you are right and anyone who has another view is wrong, then don't claim to be sincerely interested in the alternate view and then someone like me can skip bothering to share what they know with you as a pointless waste of time.
43 comments
[ 7.3 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadThere are no men's chess tournaments, see Judit Polgár for instance.
As for why there are women specific events, it's for the same reason there are women's tech meetups and conferences.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/30/sport/anna-cramling-chess...
https://www.chess.com/news/view/women-chess-players-publish-...
For online only events: because otherwise many of the would-be contender women won't even bother because there is no way they're going to get close to the top.
Chess is still very much male dominated, there are more and more women players but they are still a small minority compared to the number of men. Out of about 2000 GMs 40(!) are women.
I believe Hou Yifan is the world top female player and she's at
https://ratings.fide.com/profile/8602980
So it makes perfect sense to have women only contests and it also makes perfect sense to allow the women that want to to compete with the men (for ELO reasons alone).
Not that women are less capable than men at playing chess, but boys were historically way more encouraged than girls to partake in "intellectual" activities such as learning, playing, and mastering chess. Obviously the end result is that you get way more men than women that are good at chess. It's a bit like noticing that the most impactful people in the history of science were (mostly) men. Men are not inherently smarter, but it's a bit easier to do stuff when you can get yourself an education instead of getting married at 20 and raising the kids.
(I'm not disputing that there may be systemic factors keeping women out of chess or holding them back from performing at higher levels but the reasons you highlighted don't seem like the right ones).
I acknowledge this may be due to a lack of sensitivity or insight on my part.
So given this statement:
> excessively male-dominated for systemic reasons
I am asking: what are those systemic reasons.
The Botez sisters are probably the most visible advocates of women chess right now and that's because their father was very supportive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Botez
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Botez
But they already had their share of sexism and misogyny directed at them.
And that gets us to point 2: even if you have a supportive family, the kind of crap you will encounter might well put you off your chess career. Nobody likes to be harassed.
So then it becomes a numbers game: out of 1,000,000 men and 1,000,000 women say the original distribution of the talents required for chess are evenly distributed, pretty much all of the men interested in the game will find support and their chances of being harassed are slim. Most of them will rise to their level of competence. But for the women it is different. The vast bulk will never make it through the first filter, and if they do they will have to run a gauntlet to get to the point where they have enough of a rating to get some visibility and more support in the form of coaching. So only a fraction of them will rise to their level of competence. And that fraction is so incredibly small (about 1:50) that the chances of throwing out the female world champion approach certainty. 98% of the female talent in chess never gets enough of a chance. They either lack early support or they end up being discouraged later on by incidents.
Does that explain it?
A good explanation should account for the fact that Russia and China produce proportionally more female GMs. I wonder if the level of toxicity / harassment experienced by female players is any different in those countries or to what degree parents are more supportive of their daughters learning chess.
From this point of view GMs are made by a system that provides high quality coaching and training. You can't do it by yourself! and that this system is not providing adequate support to girls and women.
I can believe that.
I think I was ascribing too much weight to personal agency in the novice -> GM pipeline.
My school friend is still active ( https://ratings.fide.com/profile/1001396, 2223 ELO rating) and in spite of dedicating a lifetime to chess his highest ranking was 2376 (which is extremely good), he never even got to 'grand master' and he's the strongest player that I've played regularly as a kid.
But I realized that I would have to choose: technology, music or chess and technology won out because it seemed to have the biggest potential for generating income. Chess always was just a game to me, I never wanted to study opening books (which I considered cheating, what's the point in memorizing a whole raft of openings, I still believe you're supposed to pit your wits against your opponent, not to memorize 100's of standard openings that you did not come up with yourself and that is table stakes), so I tuned out. But for a year or so I felt that vibe and was really in love with the game. Fortunately Arno was much stronger than I was so he did me a great service (and I was his punchbag which helped him train his opening repertoire). I think we did 20:1 or worse in win rate but when I won it felt pretty sweet.
Chess is super intense. And if you want to be any good at all you need every little advantage. For the top (anybody ranked Fide master or above) chess is your life as long as you are active.
And if you think that the sexism is less in the chess community than in women's football I'm going to have to part with saying that I wished that I had evidence that that is the case but unfortunately it isn't. The chess world is - alas - no better than any other sport in this respect and that alone makes a good case for having a women's league, when you're doing something at the top of your abilities the last thing you need is to have that sort of thing on your mind to keep you off your best game.
Note that there are other sports where the risks to female participants and sexism are off the scale compared to both chess and women's football (properly: women's soccer in English but never mind that) such as gymnastics.
The question is should transwomen be allowed in? I can see the argument for excluding them there appears little value as they can compete fairly in the Open category.
I don't think there is any benefit to the women's category to allow transwomen join.
I think transwomen see they being allowed in as beneficial to themselves.
For instance, one problem here is that if a person that grows up as a boy transitions as a teen and they've been into chess since childhood that would already give them a massive advantage compared to the rest of the women in the competition because of the advantage that men have if they want to go into professional level chess. A girl born as a girl would have to fight for that much, much harder and this would go at the expense of their eventual rating. Chess, like playing the violin is usually - but not always, there are also late-bloomers - is a thing where the foundation is laid when you are very young, think five or six and then with a steady progression in level and coaching as you get older until you reach your peak.
I'm not sure what the answer is. I'm super sympathetic to trans rights but I would like to see a more constructive approach where this stuff is worked out in dialogue and with reason rather than just to see a focus on 'rights'. It is a game and a career and being able to switch from one side to the other can give an unfair advantage, something that trans women would have to be aware of, and that given that sport is first and foremost about fairness rather than winning should lead to some kind of compromise where everybody agrees that the new setup is a fair one and which aims for maximum inclusivity.
What are we trying to achieve? Presumably just "entertainment" but then why do governments spend huge amounts on it?
Quite a bizarre enterprise.
For some people it is their career, for some it is entertainment, for some it is a business (sometimes a huge one) and for some it is all about personal achievement or fame or prestige (in a more institutional setting, say the olympics or a world championship). These are not mutually exclusive and the matrix of combinations and goals is very complex and not at all aligned. Cheaters are a factor (doping, using computers during online chess games, trying to hobble competitors) as are the stakes that a competition is for.
Between all of those it is already a minefield before you bring in supposedly clear cut things such as human rights. But it never is clear cut in practice.
At face value it seems silly to have gender specific events, but I guess a valid reason might be to encourage participation.
There might be brain differences that account for this a controversial one I've seen argued is that some autistic traits can be useful for chess training and men then to have those traits in greater numbers.
That argument was made jokingly at a college chess club by one of the women, but given the overlap between autism and transgenderism I wonder if it's amplified?
Is the hypothesis that ASD is only over represented in male to female transitioners and do so younger but when all those have transitioned are considered there is no over representation of ASD?
It make be hard to pick apart since ASD male to female rates are so lopsided.
At least to the point that I wouldn't challenge it with ideology alone.
There is an awkwardness here. If transwomen didnt choose to feel like women we must accept it as a neurodovergent condition, why would there not be coexistence with other meurodovergent conditions?
I'm going to be honest with you, I don't really think this is a problem that needs solving. I haven't heard of a single trans GM, unlike the situation in powerlifting, cycling, etc. FIDE is infamously corrupt and this reeks to me of politics. It's also not hard to notice that it's mostly run by Eastern Europeans, usually from former Soviet satellite states, which have as a rule a dim opinion of trans people.
Human children are raised for many years and a large part of social stuff is learned behavior. Some things can be explicitly taught to people whose brain wiring disinclined them to innately pick it up on their own.
Girls are socialized differently from boys and it seems likely they are just expected to "get" social things even if they don't. They either get someone to explain it or they try harder than boys to cover up their deficits because it's more socially unacceptable.
Not everything can be taught. Some social difficulties can be rooted in things like a lack of prosody or lack of ability to tone match can be extreme priblematic and cannot be fixed, at least not that I know of.
But some things can be explained and to whatever degree it's learnable, if girls are simply more expected than boys to learn it, it's not unreasonable to suggest ASD is likely underdiagnosed in girls.
Bringing in milder autism we can dilute that down to about 4:1 maybe 3:1.
But why? Why are we positing unproven theories to discount the data? That's not good science. Trying to explain data is.
Simon Baron-Cohen the works foremost autism specialist (a clinical psychologist and cousin to Ali G Sacha Baron-Cohen). Put forwards the "extreme male" brain theory (now called emoaphising-systemising theory to avoid gendered language) theory of autism and it's pretty compelling.
If you were not interested and just want to double down on you are right and anyone who has another view is wrong, then don't claim to be sincerely interested in the alternate view and then someone like me can skip bothering to share what they know with you as a pointless waste of time.