I'm trying to read "World chess body bars trans women from competing in women’s events/The International Chess Federation’s new guidelines also strip transgender men of previously won women’s titles" (NBC News).
This isn't like swimming and tennis and the like. There's no physical component... just an insulting implication that women are mentally inferior (at least in some chess-specific way).
From the article:
I found this — not addressing the trans issue — in a Chess.com forum from 2008. Somebody says:There is no recent research that proves men have significantly different IQs or are smarter than women, and older studies — one from 2005 and another from 2006 — that do make that claim have been debunked....
Something I don't understand. I understand in arenas like basketball, where men simply have a natural physical advantage. But there is no proof that men and inherently smarter or better thinkers than women. The closest we have to that is that men tend, in general, by a tiny margin to be more analytic thinkers than women. And that is very vague, at best....
Someone else says there may be something different about the intelligence of women: They "do not spend there [sic] whole life studying a 'game.'" And: "it is to do with the way the brain is 'wired.' Women are not as good (in general) at tactical/logical pursuits in the context of a game. They also do not often posess [sic] the same winning desire."
There's also the familiar idea that men are overrepresented in the "genius" category.
But what's probably most at play in the current transgender controversy is the fact that there are so many more male chess competitors, and having a separate women's division insures that there will be some female faces among the winners. I think the Chess Federation is worried this scheme was failing.
Posts
84 comments:
Same point - why are there courses such as Investing for Women.
I am now convinced. If men and women have the same levels of chess ability, it is pointless and insulting to have separate men’s and women’s competitions. If the only reason to have women’s events is because women are underrepresented in the chess world, time will take care of that as women rush in to fill the void. Didn’t we all watch the “Queen’s Gambit”?
The 'world chess body' should read or watch The Queen's Gambit -- might finds something enlightening in it, even if it is (mostly) fiction.
Trannies have to be indulged or the global warming will kill us all.
"The closest we have to that is that men tend, in general, by a tiny margin to be more analytic thinkers than women". What is important is not the average ability, but the tails of the distribution. So if we had a measure of "chess ability" we could plot the distribution of that ability for men and for women. Even if the average ability was the same for men and women, if the very very high end of the distribution had 100 men and 0 women, women would never win a chess tournament, and that might justify having a separate women only tournament.
``The ultimate model of an activity that is at once unquestionably intelligent and intellectual and that also seems to divide the sexes is mathematics. The maleness of a mathematics department is explained either in terms of an allegedly greater male ability in mathematics, or in terms of sex-role stereotyping. You know the sort of things: ``As boys learn their sex roles, they identify with the notion that they should excel in mathematics. Girls ... learn that mathematical ability is unfeminine,'' in the words of Diane F. Halpern's _Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities_. (But the logician Ruth Marcus reports that there are feminists who argue that logic and physics are ``phallic,'' and that therefore women who go into those fields sell out, or buy out, or something. They used to be unfeminine, now they are unfeminist.)
``MIT mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota said to me one time that he thought both positions were ridiculous. ``There are plenty of women with all the talent for math anyone could want,'' he said. ``But women leave math when they discover that you can't do it without sustaining world-class illusions, such as the belief that grips one while one is working on a very difficult paper on a very obscure corner of a difficult subject, that here, at last, everything will be settled once and for all.'' Interestingly, he doesn't talk about the desire to excel, at math or anything else, as the point - he doesn't mention competitiveness.
``..Rota identifies the illusions necessary to mathematics with the faith that sustains a friend of his who is a priest. Women refuse such illusions or, say, don't care about them, are able to remain relatively calm in the face of the fact that there are issues that won't be settled once and for all, such as the exact nature of the universe or exactly what Daffodil means when she cocks her head and sticks her tongue out at you. I do not mean that women working with animals are satisfied with oversimplified or partial theories of animals, only that their minds are complex enough to sustain their contact with what they do know while noting also where their knowledge of Daffodil leaves off''
``...I keep thinking: Men are afraid of horses. They are afraid of horses because neither their professional integrity nor logic will take them to a horse, and because they do not know how to turn, deflect, a horse's fear or rage. If Dobbin says, ``You'd better get off right now, because I am going to kill you, wrangler!'' you don't of course ignore this, but it is possible to say, ``Oh, I don't think you really want to do that. Why don't we try something else?'' (Just as Moses' wife said to Yahweh when Yahweh was intent on killing Moses.) As it happens, a talented young male rider can be as formidably equipped with equestrian tact as anyone, but in the general run of things in the middle and upper classes in this country, it is the young women who are more likely than the young men to come up with a tactful rather than frightened response, and when they become foolish about this later - silliness is a feminine failing - they will say that they knew the horse had good intentions all along.
``For centuries, unable to prove Dobbin's good intentions, men have instead proven their courage on horseback...''
Vicki Hearne, _Bandit: Dossier of a Dangerous Dog_ Harper-Collins, NY, 1991, p. 221, 219
That is, men are obsessed with simplifying, women with making more complex. Chess happens to favor simplifying. What you're obsessed with is that you get good at.
Wouldn't there be women who demand women's chess if it didn't exist?
Genius men are a little more genius than genius women, and the same for stupidity. The variance of intelligence is larger for men than for women.
Perhaps a statiscal analysis of women's FIDE or USCF ratings would shine some light on the reason. I think you would find women's ratings are lower.
Althouse,
There's also the familiar idea that men are overrepresented in the "genius" category.
Also in the "moron" category. Never forget that! And if you mean "familiar" as in "Hey, Larry Summers got fired for mentioning this!," never forget either that "familiar" doesn't mean "uncontroversial."
But what's probably most at play in the current transgender controversy is the fact that there are so many more male chess competitors, and having a separate women's division insures that there will be some female faces among the winners. I think the Chess Federation is worried this scheme was failing.
Well, yes. This. I can't actually imagine hordes of MTF transsexuals descending on women's chess competitions, but if it were to happen, it would just be yet another instance of biological men taking away another few crumbs from the already-much-depleted women's table. And then FIDE, or whatever its name is, would have to explain why there was a separate female category in the first place, which of course they cannot do without causing offense.
There are women-only tournaments to encourage more women to participate in chess.
All other tournaments are Open tournaments, where the gender of the player does not matter at all.
FIDE wants to protect the FIDE-run, women-only tournaments, which is just a handful of tournaments.
At the far right hand side of the curve (and also on the left side) for most measurable traits, men predominate. So at the highest reaches of most pursuits you will find very few women. Is this really something that needs to be spelled out?
Anecdotal warning.
Our sons orientation day to start his Engineering degree, involved the parents so we attended.
The greeting meeting, I did a head count, and more than half the incoming kids were women. At graduation, females accounted for less than 10%.
A quick perusal each year of valedictorians, shows females over represented. We had two nieces, each Valedictorians, each maxed out on AP courses in math and science, each entered engineering programs in college, BOTH switched majors their sophomore year. one is a VP in big insurance business, and is head hunted constantly. The other is a teacher
There is something greater going on than just " The closest we have to that is that men tend, in general, by a tiny margin to be more analytic thinkers than women"
It might be something as simple as preference. Engineering is problem solving. The education involves learning the tools used to solve the problem at hand. The art is picking the tools.
That's the hard part. I theorize that women do not adapt well to deciphering all the things involved and prioritizing them. They are rule followers by nature.
I have no notion of Chess and the thought process involved, or if what happens in the discipline of Engineering.
Medicine is more art than science, and Women excel in that discipline.
@gspencer, at least there aren’t any specialized courses in accounting targeted specifically towards females, because as everybody knows there is no accounting for women.
Ah, the old jokes are still the best.
I get the point; there should not be a separate mens/womens chess.
Honestly, just a bit tired of that whole thing. I'm pretty sure we would be back (sic) at the state where there's no women in the top 10 chess players. Not sure where the 80 cents on the dollar falls in that one.
I'm pretty sure they started a women's chess division because women weren't winning or even placing close in the rankings against men. It's fascinating.
I see this in gaming, too. Women are just as competent as men at the fighting, but most of the theorycrafters are men. Digging into the miniscule stats and spending endless hours dummy humping in order to discover that incremental difference between gear sets is something a lot of women don't enjoy. We want to group up and kill shit.
Women's chess seems like an affirmative action gig.
Men are men and women are women. If they separate leagues then so be it.
Why is there women's chess in the first place?
To ensure a woman is crowned champion.
On average, men and women are roughly the same intelligence. However, the bell curve for men is much flatter; there are more geniuses and idiots for men than women. If that has been "debunked" I would like to see the evidence of this. Or is this "debunk" one of those where someone with no expertise just declares it debunked because it is inconvenient?
If you look at the history of competitive chess, the number of competitive women at the highest levels of competition could probably be counted on one hand. In 2020, there was all of one woman ranked in the Top 100, and she was like #89, which is not going to get any invites to top level tournaments. Per chess.com right now, the highest rated woman in the world in classical has a rating of 2628, which is tied for #123. 2027 grandmaster titles have been awarded, 40 to women.
The reason why there are women's only chess tournaments is because it is necessary. We can certainly debate why it is necessary, but necessary it is.
A former president of Harvard speculated that men dominated the fringes of the distribution of IQ, and this accounted for their domination of the higher (and lower) areas of intelligence.
And he lost his job for that.
"This isn't like swimming and tennis and the like. There's no physical component... just an insulting implication that women are mentally inferior (at least in some chess-specific way)."
Why is it "insulting"? I'll bet a lot more women would have Nobel Prizes if they had separate prizes for women. Is that insulting? Who are you to be insulted, Madame Curie?
Possibly related: How Larry Summers got cancelled for speculating why women aren't proportionately represented in higher math and physics. You may not be interested in the believers of Blank Slate theory, but they are definitely interested in you.
There is women's chess because women simply cannot compete against men and expect to win chess tournaments. This is the same reason there is women's tennis. Women cannot come even close to competing against men in tennis. The Williams' sisters proved this.
Women are not as good at chess as men are. Is there "a" woman who is as good as some random man? Of course there is. Judit Polgar comes to mind. She's beaten male players from time to time. But it is extremely rare.
In any sport or mind challenge, you learn it as a kid. Tiger Woods started playing golf at age 3, for example. Imagine being an 8 year old girl and getting beaten in EVERY SINGLE GAME you play against a boy. EVERY SINGLE ONE. It's dispiriting. People are not built to fail and continue trying in the presence of irrefutable proof that they are not qualified.
Women are better than men at some tasks, one presumes. But not chess. Or tennis. Diving comes to mind (both from a board above a pool, but also in the water).
We humans have evolved into our roles. Men who were better at strategy became hunters. Women who were better at yapping became gatherers. This is known. Are there good women hunters? Sure. But there are no prize-winning male yappers.
Why is there women's chess in the first place? My female mind fails to comprehend.
Does it have something to do with physical stamina giving an edge to men that is (or is believed to be) very difficult to overcome? The stress of many games to be played within a limited time frame, that sort of thing?
I had assumed that international chess championships are set up more or less like contract bridge — the international team championship is open, meaning that both women and men can compete head to head. However the Venice Cup is also an international team championship but teams are limited to female partnerships. The two championships are held concurrently, so a woman has to choose the championship for which she will compete.
"Why is there women's chess in the first place? My female mind fails to comprehend."
QED
Come at me!
The answer is simple. Extend Title IX for Chess. Can not have any more men than women in any chess organization. This will make everything as perfect as it has for all sports.
There's also the familiar idea that men are overrepresented in the "genius" category.
In the genius AND the "idiot" category--both tails.
Judit Polgar would wipe the floor with the vast majority of highly-accomplished male chess professionals, no doubt about it. Either Botez sister would annihilate me!
There are age divisions in pro chess, too, even though some of the most famous players are/have been child prodigies.
gspencer said...
Same point - why are there courses such as Investing for Women.
8/17/23, 3:25 PM
Because women have a different style of talking and asking questions. Men sometimes try to dominate conversations. Lots of women are fine with that and will push back equally with their own ideas, but other women are intimidated by that and want a gentler discussion. Classes like that are for them. In other words, because there's a market for it.
Several commenters including me have made the point that men are "over represented" in the tails of the distribution for intelligence and related attributes. A long time ago, I heard an explanation that the gene(s) for intelligence (and related attributes) are in the X chromosome. Females have two of these, so the intelligence is "averaged out". But men have only one X chromosome (from their mothers), so an exceptionally high intelligence set of genes is undiluted. If this is true (and I have no idea) then high intelligence males should have noticeably smart mothers.
It sounds to me, the way Althouse puts it, that while men may not be smarter than women, they are more obsessive in a game that rewards obsessiveness, well, maybe we should have weightlifting competitions for people who don't like to work out, golf tournaments for people who don't like to practice. Nobody would watch.
The biggest turnoff for me about chess, when I thought I might take it up in my retirement, is that at the higher levels, they are basically playing previous memorized games, kind of like how one used to play Pac Man, until they get to "new chess." If you haven't obsessively memorized thousands of games, openings, gambits, whatever, you can't really compete, not just with a high IQ anyway.
Professional chess is dominated by male players.
Women are not barred from men's events. Judit Polgar competed mostly or only against men and she was rated a Super-GM, above 2700, at her peak. Her sisters were almost as good but what sticks with me was what Susan Polgar said about receiving sexual harassment and death threats at tournaments. She didn't use it as an excuse but said she used it to motivate her to win tournaments, but she did say that the psychological burden is high and frankly not worth it for most women to ensure just to play in men's tournaments.
I recommend that anyone who wants to know more about this to read anything by the Polgar sisters and ignore the Queen's Gambit. It slandars the genuine historical Russian woman whom itsays played only against women. That was false, she played against male grandmasters. They did this only to hype of fake non historical character's pseudo accomplishments.
Others here have said it and I will put my oar in. There is greater genetic variance in men, it shows up in math more prominently because the spatial component is encouraged by the arrival of testosterone. It is a little-known fact but it is so that the SAT started changing the SATM in the 1970s because girls were doing almost as well on average, but were badly under-represented at the top. CEEB accepted the reasoning that this was theoretically impossible, and started tracking which answers were gotten wrong by women more often and eliminated those, because it must obviously be a bad question (even if looking at it, one couldn't see anything wrong with it.)
(This is separate from the renorming later, BTW).
I started as a math major as an undergrad and noticed that there were fewer women. I also noticed that they were treated like princesses. Perhaps it is also true that they had to fend off more negative sexist comments from some individuals and were hit on more often. I don't know that but I believe it possible. But they were never unnoticed and allowed to slip through the cracks, no matter how timid they were.
Or maybe I just expected to be treated like a prince and resented someone else getting attention. That is also possible.
The male chess players are worried they will find it distracting if the women wear short skirts.
"This isn't like swimming and tennis and the like. There's no physical component... just an insulting implication that women are mentally inferior (at least in some chess-specific way)."
Suppose men and women are equally capable mentally, yet men dominated in winning at chess. Would that be less insulting?
If there was only one chess championship, rather than men's and women's divisions, what would happen if the top 20 spots are all men or if a man takes the top spot every year?
The elites aren't comfortable with Asian-Americans being over represented at top-tier universities or the lack of women going into engineering, so it's likely that a competition in which men dominate wouldn't be permitted to exist for very long. Chess would change or be disparaged.
The article is lying. There are plenty of studies that prove men's IQ is higher then womens. Or more precisely that you get more men at both extreme's of the bell curve, both stupid and smart. That is one reason why you have large numbers of men geniuses and almost no women. and lots of men who can't tie their shoes.
Ah, but there are no RECENT studies. Yeah, that's right, because you get cancelled if you find the WRONG answer. Oh, and its been "debunked". Again, false. If you mean its been shown to be invalid. But right is you mean someone somehow SAID it was wrong.
This is how leftist media works. The media wants you to think something. Some brave soul does a well-done excellent scientific analysis and shows that something is false.
At this point, the media doesn't care if anyone actually disproves the Non-Pc study or not. All they're looking for is a hook, just some alernate analysis, no matter how shody or obviously fake. Once they get it, Poof they can say "Study x which asserted CRAZY idea Y, has been debunked" Because not 1 person in 1000 will look up the details. They can also appeal to authority: "Havard Prof say Study X is garbage." the truth is irrelevant to them.
In the USSR, they would just write "As is well known..." - we're pretty much at that point.
THe interesting thing about Women Chessmasters is they tend to be precise, careful, and rarely brilliant. There are exceptions, but when highly rated women play you never get the brilliant moves or fireworks you get SOMETIMES when two male chessmasters play
You rarely see a female Tal-style attack machine. Or a female with the brilliant agressiveness of a Fischer. Women can play very good chess. But its usually on the dull side.
And please don't tell me your Aunt Gerty is an attacking fool who checkmates everyone in 20 moves. Because I am generalizing.
THe interesting thing about Women Chessmasters is they tend to be precise, careful, and rarely brilliant. There are exceptions, but when highly rated women play you never get the brilliant moves or fireworks you get SOMETIMES when two male chessmasters play
You rarely see a female Tal-style attack machine. Or a female with the brilliant agressiveness of a Fischer. Women can play very good chess. But its usually on the dull side.
I've consistently heard over the years how Chess is as much about playing your opponent as it is the board. It's in part psychological. Women and men have different psychologies, and so it would make sense that woman would compete in Chess in very similar was to how they compete in real life.
The male chess players are worried they will find it distracting if the women wear short skirts.
Announcer: And Ms. Borodevski has opened with the 'Stone Gambit'. A rather basic move, but one that can get her into a bit of a hairy situation later, if she's not careful, right, Bob?
In women's chess, does the king become a queen and viceversa?
Or is that tranny chess?
"In the USSR, they would just write "As is well known..." - we're pretty much at that point."
"Experts say..."
"there is no proof that men and inherently smarter or better thinkers than women"
This is BS in two ways. Others have already pointed to the differences in distributions. Being "inherently smarter" is not the only relevant variable for top performance.
"a tiny margin"
In overall distributions in large populations even tiny margins can make a big difference.
"having a separate women's division insures that there will be some female faces among the winners"
And there you have it. As in women's sports in general, the point is to make women feel they're not losers all the time.
The precise question is not whether men and women really are different in some chess - related way, but why the Chess Federation has chosen, first, to create separate play for women and, second, to exclude transgender women. It is self-interested and concerned with power and perception and not just the actual difference
Go/baduk/weiqui seems to suffer from the same gender imbalance as chess.
Althouse: "... an insulting implication that women are mentally inferior (at least in some chess-specific way)."
It's not insulting if it's true.
"It is self-interested"
There's always self-interest. Even in your statements about this topic.
It might be something as simple as preference.
I think that is mostly the case. I work on open source software, and very few women show up on the code side. The work is mostly unpaid, so it becomes a question of how people want to spend their spare time. The few women who have showed up and done good work on the code side are not all that different from the men who do good work, usually pursuing an interest in things and gadgets from an early age. There just aren't as many of them.
There are professions where I think men an women are pretty much equal, music performance, for instance. Women may even have an advantage on some instruments.
Why would the Chess Federation create a separate system for women. They feel they can get more women to play chess if they can create a seperate category. You can tell a good young female chess player she can be the No. 1 woman in the world or No. 67 behind 66 better men. Which one will get her to play chess?
Plus, many women feel more comfortable playing other women when there's pressure and money on the line.
And of course, there are fans. Yes, there are a substantial group of people who attend tournaments, and "follow chess". And they want to see women play each other. Just like they want young people to play each other. Just like Tennis and Golf fans want to see women play each other.
And almost all those fans are men. And none of them want to see "Trannies" play women. Even if their Superior testostorne and height/weight wont allow to crush the women in chess, like they do in other games/sports. Let the transgenders go dominate women's boxing, wrestling, weightlifting, and rugby. WOmen shouldn't be engaging in those sports anyway.
"The precise question is... why the Chess Federation has chosen, first, to create separate play for women..."
There is no need to contort yourself into theories of what biological causes may or may not impel this choice. It is plainly a market-driven product to meet a demand. Women want it -- no one is forced to play in the women's category, all women are free to play in the open category instead. The fact that anyone signs up to play in the women's group proves that they want it. And that fact should should be a sufficient reason to supply it. If players stopped wanting it, it would be gone, because no players would sign up for it.
"...and, second, to exclude transgender women."
Same answer as above, really. If what the players want is a special group in which only women will compete, then they perforce want only women to compete in it.
Nobody's commented on the truly bizarre part of the ruling: transmen who won tournaments while they identified as women are going to have their titles stripped, I suppose on the basis that they were men all along? To avoid dead-naming them? SMH.
I graduated HS in 1973-and while anyone could join the chess team, it was all male I was one of them. My middle son graduated 2008- the chess team was all male- he was on it. Masterminds, which he was also on, was mixed sex. Masterminds didn't exist in 1973.
The rating of the top woman in chess isn't enough to be in the top 100 in the world.
Chess isn't the only thing- the top female Go player in the world (I've never played) isn't rated high enough to rank in the 100 Go players. There are female only Go tournaments.
Since 1973 the World and the US Champion Monopoly players have been male. I don't see ranking- just the champions.
Only mental competition I see where women successfully competing with men at the top levels is poker.
"why the Chess Federation has chosen, first, to create separate play for women and, second, to exclude transgender women."
If you start as a matter of faith that transgender and straight women are exactly the same, I guess it's pretty indefensible. I think that it might be interesting to allow it, because it would give a control case for the theory that it's simply a numbers game, more men play chess, etc. So I say they should let transgenders play in the interest of science, see how it sorts out.
Actually.... you could do a statistical analysis that would correct for the imbalance and make predictions of where women would stack up if women and men were precisely equally matched, chess-talent wise, given the imbalance in numbers, and compare it to actual results.
Oh, let's go to Google Scholar. It's been done. This is the abstract:
This study analyzed sex differences in chess Elo ratings with chess tournament data. We evaluated whether sex differences were due to differential participation rates of males and females, and whether age and practice were able to predict differences in chess ability. There were meaningful sex differences in Elo ratings unrelated to different participation rates. Age and practice predicted sex differences in Elo chess ratings for females, but not for males. The findings paralleled those concerning sex differences in cognitive ability research, and supported that biosocial factors (i.e., age and practice) rather than divergences in participation rates of males and females in the domain influenced the extreme sex differences in Elo ratings.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886915003852
Can somebody explain to me what the bolded text means? It reads like a word salad to me, which of course makes me wonder about the cognitive abilities of the writers. But it could be me who is stupid.
What about this: "However, there are remarkable variations in several factors accounting for individual differences in ability deterioration, such as cohort effects or higher intelligence in young days that preserve intellectual decline in later life (Gow et al., 2011, Schaie, 1994)."
Why do I get the feeling that this paper was written by AI?
I give up on understanding it. All that I can gather from it is that there is some difference in skill levels between men and women that participation rates do not explain, and so they are struggling to explain it with other factors.
Lot's of good ideas to explain why a woman's division? To give women more exposure by increasing the number of top end players.
Think of athletics. The NFL could double its profits, if it just increased the number of teams.
The problem with that, is the number of players. As in, there are not enough players that can compete at that high level of play.
Why ban transgenders?. See above. There are a few good women players, just not enough to populate the top ranks. If all of a sudden half of the top women's spots are filled with trans, the whole equal intelligence thing has to get re-examined. Or, Maybe woman in general are not that keen on chess.
Althouse can't figure out: ... "why the Chess Federation has chosen, first, to create separate play for women and, second, to exclude transgender women."
It's very simple, but since you're a woman, it's not uncommon for people like you to be unable to figure this out. So let me mansplain it to you. Which I'm certain will anger you because you're a woman and therefore, a lesser intellect consumed primarily by emotion, like a child.
The Chess Federation chose to create separate play for women and men because women CANNOT COMPETE against men. In ANY sport or endeavor. They are inferior chess players. Does that mean all women are inferior? Does it mean ALL women can't contribute? To you it probably does, but you are inferior, so we will discount that and explain that no, it does not mean that. There might be some outlying woman who could potentially be a better chess player than all men (but we still haven't found that person.)
They're excluding "transgender women," heretofor known as "men," because they are MEN. And they are not playing your little childish obfuscation game.
They are not WOMEN. You see, a FEMALE Supreme Court Justice probably cannot define what a man is or what a woman is, but a MALE Supreme Court Justice, being smarter than the women, can do that. We expect our female Supreme Court nominees to be sort of idiots, compared to men, but we want you to feel included, so we let you on the losing side. Where you can feel good, but present no harm to mankind. Yes. MAN kind.
WOMEN are inferior chess players and allowing fake MEN to play them would be unfair to the women.
Do you get it now? I doubt that you do. Because you are the inferior intellect on this topic. And all other ones too.
Just for the record, poker is the same way. Professional poker is dominated by female players.
Brain fart. Dominated by male players.
Can we at least agree that if there is a system for women to play chess that men should not be included in that system?
as a non chess player, who hates chess and thinks chess is Stupid and Dull and who always loses,
i'd like to point out, that as i understand it:
a) There is NO SUCH THING as a men's division for chess
b) There is an Open Division (open for EVERYONE), and a Woman's Division (only for women)
Assuming that's true, why don't they just change the divisions to
a) Open Division open for Everyone)
b) Cis-Women's division about for Cis-Women
???
How, Exactly would someone be upset about that? WHY, Exactly could someone be upset about that?
Science is never debunked. People who claim research paper B "debunks" research paper A are repositories of bunk.
iowan2: My daughter was also an engineering major. She stuck it out, graduated with an engineering degree. Now works in a completely different field. One reason females who start out in engineering degrees end up elsewhere is they realize they can have a much more lucrative career outside engineering.
As to male and female categories in chess, or any other competitive but nonphysical sport: Participation is increased when playing against peers, and "peers" can be either the same level at the sport or the same age range or the same sex. It it a participation enhancer to get more people involved. And I, for one, am glad there are Senior leagues, because my tired old fat ass can't compete with the younglings.
@gilbar Why entertain the pronoun bullshit at all? Just use Open and Women's, like now.
You're proposing we alter the language of 99.99% of the population to assuage the little feelzies of .01% of the population.
I propose we ignore the .01% of the population and let them grow some skin.
Questar, what would you call it when paper A cannot be reproduced despite numerous attempts and some of those attempts show results negating the premise of paper A?
I'm surprised no one has brought up the Scandinavian countries, as Jordan Peterson does regularly. He notes that in those countries, where sexual equality is probably pretty much peak in terms of public policy, workforce participation, etc., men tend to choose "man" jobs like construction and women tend to choose "woman" jobs like nursing and teaching - "gendered" professions are nowhere near 50-50. In other words, where other factors such as "affordable high quality child care" and such are held as equal as any society on earth has ever been able to manage and therefore preference more or less rules, gender roles become more, not less, pronounced.
Add to that the uncharitable but, I suspect, true statement from Sebastian above: "As in women's sports in general, the point is to make women feel they're not losers all the time," and you get women's divisions in areas where, except at the upper tail, women can in fact compete hear to head with men.
Pace Sebastian, I might have said something like, "The point is, in areas where, at the highest levels, the performance of those rarified women won't quite reach that of those rarified men, and in getting up to those levels, it's necessary to maintain morale in order to encourage continued participation. Therefore girls' and women's divisions exist so that the best girls and women won't stop playing as they start uniformly losing to the best boys and men. It's for fun." All of which is a lot less pithy than what Sebastian said, but then I'm a woman (and so I bristled at the "feel like losers" phrase even though the reasonable contextual interpretation would be "lose all the time," not "are losers") and a wordy one at that.
And furthermore - anecdote, but one that seemed to apply to almost all participants. All three of my kids were in Little League, two of them through middle school and one until he was 16 (where they call it "juniors," in our area - not sure whether that's a thing everywhere). My two sons liked it when they were drafted into teams where their friends were, but for my daughter in softball, it was a must - to the point where the same team would just continue year after year, including the same coach. The boys (and the one girl who continued in baseball once it got to the kid-pitch level) played on whatever team choose them. But the league didn't break up the girls' teams once they were working.
My son who stayed in baseball the longest finally quit because, though he absolutely loved playing, he recognized that he'd gone as far as he was going to; he wasn't going to get a scholarship or anything, so it was time to stop playing competitively and just play for fun. Many of his friends continued to play, but that wasn't enough to get him to keep going, though the team would have been happy to have him (he was always #1 in the lineup because he always got on base, and he was a favorite closer because his "junk" pitches were crazy and effective).
It seems to me that maybe girls play sports or participate in competitions for somewhat different reasons from boys - that friendships with their teammates (or maybe, in individual pursuits, their co-competitors) may be a stronger driver for continued participation than among boys.
Ahem. Because they would never win at the grandmaster level.
I don't know why, but I suspect men are better at chess than women. Thus, a women's league may serve the same purpose in chess, but for some other reason.
In any event, if we let the trans play women's chess, don't be surprised if it pans out the same way as it does in athletics.
I don't know why, but I suspect men are better at chess than women. Thus, a women's league may serve the same purpose in chess, but for some other reason.
In any event, if we let the trans play women's chess, don't be surprised if it pans out the same way as it does in athletics.
I don't know why, but I suspect men are better at chess than women. Thus, a women's league may serve the same purpose in chess, but for some other reason.
In any event, if we let the trans play women's chess, don't be surprised if it pans out the same way as it does in athletics.
Guys have mental advantages in chess. A little early in the morning to look up Steve Sailer, but statistically it's pretty overwhelming, with rare exceptions, who do compete with men.
A great discussion with no real political bias.
Wish there were more of these.
There is also the obvious issue of Chess being a global game and some cultures discourage women from comingling with males that aren't relatives or husbands.
A top female chess player may be able to get around those sort of cultural restrictions, but a younger player that is just coming up may not.
Xmas at 7:47am, a very interesting point!
Only mental competition I see where women successfully competing with men at the top levels is poker.
The World Series of Poker main event final table (final 9 players) has only had a woman on it once, and she finished 5th in 1995.
I have seen an analysis of the point that Xmas makes.
The data indicated that repressive cultures that subjugate women do not have any top-ranked female chess players.
It turns out that they also have zero top-ranked MALE chess players!
It seems that repressive cultures are bad for everyone.
"The precise question is not whether men and women really are different in some chess - related way, but why the Chess Federation has chosen, first, to create separate play for women and, second, to exclude transgender women. It is self-interested and concerned with power and perception and not just the actual difference."
I don't agree that this is a precise question: it is a subjective one, leaning away from, then embracing the "statistics" you use to bolster the point. So why shouldn't we use statistics too?
I don't think the Chess Federation is just a bunch of TERFS, though one can hope. There are plenty of socially cancelled studies proving that men are smarter than women at the peak levels of the types of intelligence needed for chess. See the research by John Dalrymple and Steve Sailor for some real statistics. At the grandmaster level, men still outplay women despite decades of trying to foster female participation in the sport -- an initiative, incidentally, of the Chess Federation itself, which has also successfully worked to increase minority participation in the game. Turns out that chess is far more appealing to male minorities than female ones, too.
There are outliers, but the male brain tends towards the top of the particular intelllectual and perhaps competitive attributes that make grandmasters -- by quite a hell of a lot.
The Queen's Gambit is a fictional film, and a rather irritating one, though I do have some nominal nostalgia for the days when female geniuses like Sylvia Plath and even the horrendous Simone De Beauvoir did beat their way past real sexism into the upper echelons of their intellectual worlds, either with perfect lipstick and petticoats, or hair that hadn't been washed in a year.
To put this in a bit more context, the Candidates Tournament is run every two years, with the winner getting a chance to play for the World Championship. Five of the spots are awarded by two qualifying tournaments, one of which has 200+ players, but if you are not in the top 20 in the rankings the chance of qualifying for the Candidates is basically nil. Anyone ranked 50 or lower even threatening to qualify would be a massive story, at least as far as chess is concerned.
A favorable juxtaposition of the sexes... gender [attributes].
Plenty of women don't like games. My mother once told me she perferred "real life". Chess is probably at the bottom of women friendly games. You silently stare at a board and move pieces. Most women like Bridge or Scrabble more.
Again, it so tiresome to have to constantly pushback who deny IQ reality. In general men do better in Math SAT and in almost every IQ test portion related to spatial ability. Its a fact. But people still want to believe its a myth, or been debunked, or its somehow "up in air".
Just because you find a few great women chess players and the occassional great female mathmatician or Scientist doesn't change that.
cultural restrictions
Good point. Our culture restricts marriage to binary couplings: couples and couplets. In fact, Democrats recently codified this forward-looking arbitrary exclusion in federal law under the principle of political congruence ("=").
"It seems to me that maybe girls play sports or participate in competitions for somewhat different reasons from boys - that friendships with their teammates (or maybe, in individual pursuits, their co-competitors) may be a stronger driver for continued participation than among boys."
If you're going to suggest there might be a difference between males and females, you're going to upset a lot of people.
Some of your assumptions in the original post and the ensuing discussion are just factually wrong.
Although there _are_ women's only tournaments, there aren't really "men's tournaments", women can and do play in the "open tournaments". So chess as a whole is not segregated, but there are special tournaments on the side that only (biological) women can join.
The gender differences in chess are actually kindof interesting. There is a tiny (~10 point) average difference in male/female GrandMaster scores... but in all master ranks women tend to be only around 20% of the players.
The average female International Master (the next rank down) is a actually a few points higher than the average male IM.
The average female FIDE Master (the third tier) is FAR below the average male in this category, and people have theorized that this is basically the fault of these women's only tournaments in easier regions allowing some weaker players to achieve the necessary scores for this title. This issue is probably made worse by the fact that the many (maybe even most?) of the strongest female players will refuse to play in women's only tournaments, which would otherwise stiffen the competition here and cause the ladder to be better aligned with "open" FIDE scores.
Some support for "women FMs are a bit over-ranked" comes from the fact that the next rank down for women is extremely sparse. (there are actually ~half the number of candidate masters, the next level down, than there are FMs, whereas every other rank progression is properly pyramid-shaped).
“There is no recent research that proves men have significantly different IQs or are smarter than women, and older studies — one from 2005 and another from 2006 — that do make that claim have been debunked....”
Pretty sure they’ve also been rebunked.
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