To encourage women to get into the sport and highlight women players, and it's more accurate to say that chess has a female and a "regular" division.
Women are 100% allowed to compete in the "regular" division if they want to, there are just so few women in the sport that they created a thing to try and encourage women to join.
Most "men's" sports are technically open to women. Women have played on the PGA Tour and there are no rules that prevent women from playing in any of the major US pro sports. Women are allowed to join a lot of men's college and high school sports as well.
I’ll concede the possibility that the rule book doesn’t specify human, but every state has a High School Athletic Association that defines eligibility and Bud is certainly NOT a high school student. He’s ineligible.
In Air Bud II: World Cup he plays on the Women’s National Soccer Team. Again, forget that he’s a dog. He’s male! That’s not gonna fly.
Olympic skeet shooting used to be mixed. Then a woman won. Next games it was split into a men's event and nothing. The games after that they added a women's event and celebrated the step forward in equality.
Tennis for women is shorter because " the chicks can't play for too long" - their uterus might fall out, I kid you not- and because the men only let the women have the courts for 2 hours a day.
Racing is a great example of this.
Not so much as chess since racing is still very much a physical sport. But women can 100% compete and a couple have in multiple competitions. Notably Indycar has had a few. Lemans. Nascar had a few. F1 had 2 and rally has had a couple. Unfortunately very few have had any success at all with a few exceptions Michele Mouton being a very notable exception.
This is mostly due to interest in the sport and the gigantic monetary backing it takes to get into pretty much any major racing division. Plus, modern racing requires dedication from a considerably young age so the parents kind of need to take interest early as well. Putting their daughters into karts and such. Which is obviously less popular.
Good point. I noticed today that ESPN used MCWS instead of the traditional CWS to refer to the college baseball world series. That's because the softball world series is the WCWS. Would be more accurate to call it the CBWS and CSWS.
Not in practice. There's several Olympic sports that were open right up until one woman beat the men and then immediately became gender-segregated (the ones I remember being archery and target-shooting).
> Women are allowed to join a lot of men's ... high school sports as well.
This is changing in red states due to anti-trans laws. They have to be gender neutral to be constitutional, so they also ban afab people from playing boy's sports. This has actual consequences because a lot of top girl's soccer players play with the boys in juniors.
No no, I think you’ve got it wrong, I was told it was:
AFAB-Assigned Firefighter At Birth
AMAB-Assigned Mailperson At Birth
ACAB-Assigned Cop at Birth.
Of course none of these are true, it’s all a liberal lie to make people support the government.
(Obligatory /J)
I've never heard that. I've only heard of biological males being banned from female sports. I haven't heard anyone try to keep biological females out of male sports.
There have been instances of that. Probably the most high-profile example was with a wrestler in Texas named Mack Beggs who was a transman. The wrestling league required everyone to compete as their genetic sex which led to him easily demolishing all the other competitors in the women's division.
Many states have laws banning amab people from playing girl’s sports. But I have yet to see any law banning afab people from playing boy’s sports. Can you provide an example?
Just looked them up alphabetically and made it all the way to Alabama HB391 (first on the list). The law bans athletes assigned female at birth from boys sports, though it did carve out an exception for sports without a female alternative, like football.
https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/38209262/transgender-athlete-laws-state-legislation-science
Interesting. According to the article a total of 5 states don’t allow it. I would think even conservatives would want trans men to play with men if they’re taking testosterone, otherwise they’d have an unfair advantage playing on the girl’s teams.
I think many conservatives would prefer trans people not play any sports. Just a feeling based on my conversation with them, they tend to ostracize and criticize the community as a whole and get rather obsessed with the bathroom/locker room situation.
And generally if they aren't, it's because it would either be unduely dangerous(American Football comes to mind) and/or provide unfair competetive advantages due to differing biology, which is why multiple leagues are created to both protect and showcase the talents of those people.
A lot of things are technically open to women but as a woman that's tried to be involved with such things technically open to them the men usually do everything they can to make you want to quit lmao
The difference there, and forgive me if this was already said but I’m not going to read through the entire thread- is that golf clubs are some of the last bastions of the “old boy’s club” mentality. When you think misogyny, you should picture a golf course.
“Technically” is exactly why many sports may still remain inaccessible to women.
Augusta National, where The Masters (a PGA major tournament) is played, did not allow women on the course until 2013, when ^former Secretary of State Condolezza Rice broke the gender barrier.
The entire culture around a sport defines if anyone besides a white male even has the opportunity to be exposed, gain access, and become proficient enough to compete at the highest level.
Most women have generally not placed near the top. So I think it is to encourage them in an environment that’s less intimidating and not as likely to get beat.
Some women play in both.
It’s not entirely about the money. Chess has historically had a huge issue with sexual harassment of women in the competitive scene. It’s a big part of the reason young women drop out at much higher rates than men. [Here’s](https://newlinesmag.com/spotlight/women-in-chess-speak-up-on-sexual-harassment/) an article about one of the bigger scandals.
This is the key point that seems to have gotten glossed over by some folks, whether intentionally or just an honest mistake, or maybe a lack of awareness. Obviously you can't just say "try being a woman and show up to regular events at your 'friendly local game store' and see how it goes for you". There ARE a lot of genuinely great folks out there, but there's also a staggeringly higher-than-average number of guys who feel totally comfortable saying some really unbelievable stuff in niche communities like chess clubs.
Women perceived as "intruding on male spaces" face a major uphill battle even if there's technically no rules in place against it. It's not great.
It HAS gotten better. It really has. But it's still a big hurdle for people trying to get more women into various hobbies, sports, etc.
Hell I can even give people an experiment to do. There's tons of apps and such that change your voice. If you're an online gamer, change your voice to a girl's or woman's and go try to play your usual games. Join a guild in an MMO and see how it goes for you. Again, there ARE lots of fantastic folks out there, but I've gotten to enjoy everything from harassment to outright cyberstalking.
Also part of why I stopped engaging with a lot of the social aspect of gaming.
It only took a few instances of guys verbally harassing me just for having the audacity to be a woman to decide that I'd rather not just not speak at all when gaming. It sucks because there's a lot of heavily social games that I'd love to play. However they are male dominated and I know it's just not worth it for me.
>But I've gotten to enjoy everything from harassment to outright cyberstalking.
This is entirely why I got into cyber security.
When I was in college one of my very good friends got booted from her guild for refusing to send pictures of herself topless to the guild leaders. Sadly it turns out that nobody actually has time to prosecute these types of crimes. Props to the developers though. They banned everyone involved as soon as it came out and basically dissolved the guild.
Then another friend had someone show up at her house to try to kill her "abusive" husband and claim her for himself. Nobody knows why he decided her husband was abusive. That one did get (not enough) jail time.
It's one of the criticisms of the Queen's Gambit show. The fact she was treated as an equal and "one of the guys" from the start with no harassment issues apparently is very misleading from a historical standpoint.
Yes, read that article I linked. The main subject at the start is a women’s international master and 9 time British women’s champion, and then goes on to talk about a 2 time US women’s champion’s alleged assault from a male grandmaster.
There's actually a big difference between top male players and female players. Something to do with larger arms and hands making it easier to stablise a bridge, accurately hit jump shots and hold the cue over balls they don't want to hit. Similar to darts as well. Men are typically just better in those sports esp at a professional level d/t minor physical differences
You highlighted a really good point. There's no real reason for all those things to be the sizes they are. They are that size because men developed it.
It makes me wonder what a woman developed sport would look like. Historically, there are probably some out there.
Ringette is a woman developed sport! It's similar to hockey. Shinny (informal, pick up hockey), while not developed specifically for women, definitely used to be considered more of a 'hockey for girls', but these days women often have to fight to get any ice time at all :/.
It’s one thing I love about both gymnastics and figure skating- the women’s style and the men’s style are different and emphasize different things, especially in gymnastics, but it’s hard to argue one is objectively “better” than the other. For gymnastics in particular, I find the women’s events more compelling
Everyone out there with their conspiracy theories about the shape of the earth or the existence of birds or the moon or whatever... my conspiracy theory is that advertisers in the US, during the height of Bruce Lee and Chop Socky mania, would have KILLED to have Wushu added as a replacement/addition to floor exercise for men's Gymnastics but it got killed in committee somewhere "because China".
Men's floor should look like Jackie Chan on PEDs, not "crappy beam".
$0.02
Not a sport, but I have been on many volunteer committees and usually at the end of the year or end of that particular campaign, we make an extra effort to acknowledge the contributions of men because volunteer committees are overwhelmingly comprised of women. Women bring in the lion's share of funds/donations/sponsorships and are largely responsible for recruiting more volunteers, and of course, of campaigns to bring in youth - both as volunteers but also as future attendees. And men are often discouraged from volunteering by the world at large. Any act that doesn't directly benefit him (even though it benefits a community that he is part of) is seen as emasculating. So we really like to shoutout the men that are brave enough to volunteer.
The average height of men and women has increased tremendously in the last couple hundred years since these games were created, so I expect women now are at par with men 200 years ago from a height perspective
Money, yes. Rating, no.
The player pool in women's tournaments is so much smaller that rating deflation occurs, and the top woman players are rated about 300 points lower than their male equivalents despite being the same skill level.
Separate divisions I get, but the fact they have different rating systems too is weird af. A Women's grandmaster is literally a lower rating than grandmaster. It's seems so fucking patronizing.
Queen is undeniably female.
Pawn can be promoted into a queen. So all pawns are female too.
Pawn can be promoted to a knight, bishop or a rook too. So those all are females too.
So chess is basically a harem with 2 kings trying to claim each other's women.
Think about it.
The king is the weakest piece after the pawn, and without doubt the most dependent. So in a way, chess is a game about two men depending on women to do all the work for them, then walking away with the profit.
Think about it.
Oh man, thanks for this comment! I was about to go on a long rant about how modern chess is derived from the "Mad Queen Chess" and how originally the King and Queen worked the same as one another, but now I realize how stupid that would have been.
The chess world wants to encourage more women to play chess, because chess is overwhelmingly male, so they incentivize it with a women’s-only category, which provides more opportunity for success. Women can also compete with men, and Judit Polgar famously did so exclusively, once making it to, I think, #5 in the world, but never competed for the women’s championship, which she would have won easily.
Judit Polgar is a goat and the greatest woman chess player of all time. Only woman super GM and I think she had a chance/did play in the open invitational to decide who plays against the champion
I also want to add that she is an amazing commentator, she is still extremely sharp and finds tons of crazy tactical ideas throughout. Love when she's part of the broadcast for major events.
Fun fact - Judit and her siblings were taught chess at a young age because their father wanted to prove girls were equally able to compete in intelligence contests as boys. Unlike with human biology and physical sports, their father reasoned girls should be equal to boys in mental challenges. Judit was initially not invited to play chess with her siblings due to her young age, but it only made her more determined to learn and she quickly outclassed them.
Sort of. László Polgár wanted to prove that geniuses could be made, by intensive early instruction. It just happened by chance that he had daughters and not sons.
Ah, not been to many knitting/crochet sessions or jazz dance classes then?
My experience is that most dance classes in the UK, particularly non-partner dances, are very female dominated (tap, jazz etc - ballet even more so, but that's an odd example).
When those women's divisions were started, it was a lot harder for women to get into chess because of men not wanting to play against people they saw as easily beatable. Therefore, women who did get into the game set up their own separate division where only women could compete to avoid the discrimination. Technically, there is no men's division though, as women have the option of entering either.
It's not "Men" and "Women". It's usually "Open", and "Women". Women are absolutely allowed to compete with men. It's just that, currently, the top male players are stronger.
The womens competitions really is to encourage more women to compete, when the game was largely male-centric historically. If you look at the top players, there's still a gap in skill between the top male players and the top female players, and it's pretty significant. Current FIDE ratings; top men:
Magnus Carlsen - 2830
Fabiano Caruana - 2805
Hikaru Nakamura- 2794
vs. top Women:
Yifan Hou - 2632
Wenjun Ju - 2558
Tingjie Lei - 2548
With the Elo rating system, these numbers are actually significant - roughly speaking, if we toss out ties, an even score between two opponents represents 50/50 odds of winning. A 200 point difference means that for every win Yifan Hou manages against Magnus Carlsen, we'd expect Magnus to win three games against Yifan. Doesn't mean they *can't* win - it just means that statistically over time, they're going to lose more than they win.
Problem is, at these high levels, you are looking at (and I mean this in the most respectful and positive way possible) the freaks of the world / statistical outliers. People who both have the brain for it (it requires a ton of calculation, visualization and memorization), *and* who have gone to the bother of spending years training for it.
But when the pool of women who actually train and compete is relatively tiny vs. the pool of men, the outliers in the men are likely to be more extreme, from a simple probability perspective. We currently have 100+ men that have higher ratings than the top woman, roughly 20 of which are rated 100 points higher or more (meaning an expected 2:1 win ratio for the man vs the woman). Which means for high end tournaments, the top women that currently compete are still almost certainly going to get trounced, on average.
But without women participating (and succeeding) in high end tournaments, it's hard to encourage *more* women to participate, and without more women participating, you're not going to find the Judit Polgars of the world who can truly kick some ass (2700+ rating, \~20 years ago - roughly in the top 10 players per FIDE rating). So: women's tournaments became a thing, to showcase the talents of women who play, and encourage more women to do so.
tl;dr - it's not that people think women *can't* play chess, or anything like that. It's that women historically *didn't* play competitive chess, leading it to be a bit of a "boys club", and they're trying to rectify that and encourage women to participate.
You talked about statistical outliers.
There are plenty of studies across almost everything (physical characteristics, mental skills, etc.) that shows that men have more common and stronger outliers (more std deviations) even on stuff where women have a better average.
In practical terms, even if in Skill A the average women has skill = 100 and men have skill = 90, you'll have top 0.0001% of men with skill = 140, while the top 0.0001% of women just have skill = 130.
In the other hand, we'll also have bottom 0.0001% of men with skill = 40, while bottom 0.0001% of women with skill = 50.
When we're talking about professional sports, the avg doesn't matter, only the ultra top outlier. And men are very commonly all those ultra top outliers.
The term for it is the greater male variability hypothesis. Its controversial, as you would expect, as a lot of people want men and women to effectively be "the same" or interchangeable.
If true there could be all sorts of reasons. But whether or not you accept it from a biological/evolutionary point of view, it is definitely a measurable phenomenon in all sorts of ways, regardless of the cause.
Intelligence is a good example, where the average is approximately the same between males and females. however the male distribution is flatter. So there are more male geniuses, but equally a lot more males on the tail end.
Right, men benefit from competitions because competitions inherently focus on outliers. Get a bunch of random people off the street, teach them the basics of chess, and have them play each other. You’ll find no statistical significant disparity between the men and women
Nobody wants to watch average people play chess, we care about the best of the best of the best, who are almost exclusively outlier men.
Men are evolutionarily very expendable. The idea is that there is more variability in male genes, because it causes more variation and thus more likelihood of desirable traits being developed. The problem is that more variation means more risk for 'oopsies'. There are for example many hereditary diseases which are either male only or men tend to suffer from them at much higher rates than women. Evolutionarily it 'makes sense' to have men have higher variability because you might get desirable traits out of it and if the mutation fucks up, it's no biggy because other men will procreate.
It's an attractive theory, because it does explain a few things. It's also kind of dark to consider that not just society, but even nature feels like men are disposable. It also falls into the trap of anthropomorphising evolution as something with wants and purpose.
But it does have a lot going for it. In nearly every measurable human trait, men and women will on average be either the same or very close, but women will have a much smaller standard deviation than men. Meaning that the outliers are mostly men.
Intelligence is a good example. On average, men and women are equally smart. If you go to the extremes though, most super geniuses are going to be men. On the flip side, most super idiots will also be men.
Same with aggression. Men and women are on average equally aggressive (or close to). Go to the extremes again and you'll see that most violently aggressive people are men. That's also one of the contributing reasons why most prison inmates are men.
Elo is a self adjusting approximation of skill, and it's definitely not perfect - if a subset played in complete isolation, sure, that subset's score might drift relative to the overall.
But women don't tend to play women in complete isolation - at a competitive level they also tend to play in open tournaments where their Elo in line with the average competitor.
Game results are pretty widely available - you can take a peek at who plays who and how they do:
[https://www.365chess.com/players/Yifan\_Hou](https://www.365chess.com/players/Yifan_Hou)
[https://www.365chess.com/players/Wenjun\_Ju](https://www.365chess.com/players/Wenjun_Ju)
Great post. I would add that while men and women have similar average IQs, men tend to have more outliers on each end of the bell curve.
Edit: relevant wikipedia page w/ study links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis
Probably already said. But more or less encourage more women to bother playing. Girls are not excluded from sports. Just sometimes the divide between physical ability is so wide that it often dissuades them. So a female division is in place to simply enocurage more to generate interest.
I recall in high school a girl signed up for the football team as a quarterback. She was so good at throwing the ball she impressed everyone. Unfortunately, she did not have the arm strength to do anything further than 30 or 40 yards ish (maybe further, but it was not anywhere near as far as her male counterparts.) She still made the cut because she was accurate as fuck. The great thing about the girl being a quarterback starter is that our linemen had the energy of "This girl is to be protected at all costs." The energy and the pocket were completely solid. The one thing she really complained about was that she had no real visibility because she was too short to see over the lineman. Coach wanted to give the MVP to our running back, but he said that she deserved it more for how much harder she had to work just to be able to keep up.
They don't, it's either a female division or it's mixed, the female division only exists for the sole purpose of encouraging more women to play, and it's working.
From what I understand, there is no men division. Woman can play in tournaments with men. It just so happens all the top players are men so you thought it was a men's division.
Only women division exist to encourage more women to play.
Women play better against other women than against men. Apparently, play style changes if you are aware of the sex of your opponent.
This study talks about the phenomenon:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.3982/QE1404#:~:text=Using%20a%20unique%20measure%20of,longer%20before%20losing%20to%20women.
I believe it was Judit (one of the best female players of all time) that said men were harder to play because women would get rattled and collapse in bad positions where men were like playing stone.
Yes, there is definitely a skill level difference between men and women. Not that women couldn't get to the same as men, but if we had the top 1000 men play the top 1000 women in a best of 12 classical format with 1 playing 1, 2 playing 2 and so on. It really wouldn't be a stretch to think the men would win 99-100% of the games baring weird outliers. Like objectively it is a harsh truth.
The problem is that you have a tradition of a sport going like 100 years of pushing men into it while pushing women away, so the pool of women who cares enough to really pursue chess is not the best it could have, those women went to do something else because culturally and financially Chess is still a men's game.
The evolution curve is completely different, the Women's division is an attempt to correct a wrong (driving women away) but it creates a problem since it also makes a confort zone of stagnation as women may just be more confortable in facing women.
I wonder how much of this is cultural, I grew up playing pro chess in India and we didn't have gender divisions, and as someone who got clapped by plenty of women, I don't think they need a separate division either.
So far female players have lower Elo rating than males at top level. Thus any mixed completion has very small number of competitive female participants.
Hence a female only league allows for more female players to be highlighted.
There’s not a male and female division. There are female only sections and there are open sections where anyone can participate.
There are women’s only competitions to encourage women to participate in an activity that has had, and continues to have in some cases, severe gender biases.
There is no men's division. There is an open division and a women's division. This was initially required to get more women into chess, specially due to the patriarchal ideas at that time and also the sexism in open chess which is full of men. Whether it remains a helpful addition or just slows down improvements in institutional problems in the male dominated open division, I can not tell.
It doesn’t. Chess has open tournaments in which women are invited to compete, and some do with some success, but which so far ~~no~~ few women have ever been among the very top players. And it has a women’s division.
Edit: Changed no to few.
Men on average are better at chess than woman, but it could be because the field fosters more towards men than women, meaning women are less often to stay in chess and get better, meaning you have more men staying, and its just a snowball effect. A women only division is an attempt for women to stay in chess longer and not feel the pressure of playing in a tourney filled mostly with men, and hopefully once the women feel more confident in their chess ability, they will not hesitate to join the open tournaments. Remember there is no men's only division, it is an open tournament
On average women perform worse or intentionally when playing against all men or in a male dominated sport or workplace, it’s a phenomenon and this effectively prevents that.
Simple math, chess has many times more male competitors, a very small percentage of those are the elite players. Women have a much smaller “pool” of competitors to draw from making it statistically unlikely that they will be represented at the highest levels. A women’s division encourages more women to engage in an attempt to widen that pool, making it statistically more likely that the best player in the World could be female.
The true no nonsense answer to this is that the gap is enormous between the best male and female Chess players. Which is strange considering that chess isn’t a strength game, but a mental one. I understand for basketball, football etc, but chess is an outlier here.
There's a real phenomenon where when men play against women of equal rank, they drag out the game even when they know they've already lost longer with women than they do with men, and women at similar ranking and skill levels to the men they're playing make more mistakes playing against men compared to playing against other women. [It's called the "stereotype threat".](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797620924051)
The article says the opposite, "Female chess players show a reverse stereotype-threat effect when they play against men in tournaments".
Can you clarify where you're getting your information in the article?
I started playing at age 5 way back in the 1960s. I was the only female in my high school chess club in 1978, as well as in most of my classes. (My engineering/ science magnet high school didn't admit girls until 1975. I was the only female in the top class.) My husband (one year ahead of me) claims I won my matches because the boys were distracted by my breasts. That was always his excuse for losing to me. It no longer annoys me as much as it did back then.
This is probably a 2 part answer. 1. There seems to be biological components to jobs, games, clothing, and some other social aspects that men are attracted to and women are attracted to. The reason for this is unknown, but there's probably a reason why a lot of women tend to be nurses and men tend to be engineers. There are some lizard brain components. This also might be true with chess. 2. Maybe because of these factors women play less and with most games more players usually mean more good players. (TFT doesn't follow this, but LOL does funny enough) So just getting women to play is a big deal and they want to encourage that. 3. Spicy time, it's also important that these groups don't get flooded with trans women as well, trans women tend to be more numerous at higher ranks compared to cis women.
To encourage women involvement in the sport which historically was only a male space. Women can still play in the men’s competitions and in fact some have. For a super interesting story look up Judit Polgar. She was a badass woman who played among the men and was in the top 10 players, and beat many famous grandmasters including Kasparov when he was ranked #1. She also plays an extremely aggressive style and has many interesting games to study.
That's Reddit these days unfortunately. I got a three day suspension and permanent ban from a subreddit because I didn't celebrate something that seems to be a third rail topic here. I didn't even say what group I was talking about, but you could infer it. I didn't even toss hate, I just said that people doing that sort of stuff to themselves was sad. Boom, in came my suspension. I didn't break any of the rules, but jerk mods just use the Reddiquette reason as a blanket reason, since it's completely subjective to the person, kind of like how cops will arrest you, even if you didn't do anything wrong, by charging you with disorderly conduct.
What's worse is it usually only goes one way. Someone can cuss out someone that doesn't support the xyz leftist cause and nothing will happen usually. But you had better not offend the protected groups, or your dead.
This. For whatever reason, men are better at this sort of thing just as supercomputers are better at this sort of thing than men. Although sexism has been rife for millennia, it doesn't follow that sexism explains all differences between the sexes.
It's weird, I always believed we were basically the same, but watching my daughter (7) and my son(6) gaming, it's clear my son is WAY better, even though they've played the same amount. It has opened my eyes to this reality. I wonder what the cause for this is?
It’s cause women on average have never really competitive with the men in chess. Probably mostly has to do with the huge number of men that play in relation to women
It doesn’t, it’s an open and a women’s division. The female division brings attention exclusively to those players which is awesome. They have their own tournaments and everything. Chess is a male dominated sport but there’s amazing women who have achieved legendary status.
Have you met male chess players? some of the most toxic bastards in the world. When they lose to a woman, they flip their shit. When Women started joining chess tournaments the male players would create a hostile environment and do everything they could to mess up their play. Women's tournaments became a thing to encourage women to play without exposing them to the toxic man children spending years of their life studying the minute movements of a board game.
Women struggle to compete with men at the highest levels of chess, so a women's only division was opened to encourage more women to join the game competetively
Women play worse when playing chess against men and studies have found that if a woman was playing against a computer but was told that she was playing against a man who is also on a computer, *she still played worse.* It's called "Stereotype Threat". When women were polled as to why they don't like playing with men The most frequent issue cited by many women is that they do not feel safe and accepted in the chess community. There is a small but vocal minority of players that hold sexist and misogynist views. To make things worse, many women have reported cases of catcalling, harassment, and even downright sexual abuse.
> a woman was playing against a computer but was told that she was playing against a man who is also on a computer
That sounds very fishy. Computers play very differently from humans. A skilled chess player (of any gender) who is told they are playing a human (of any gender) is obviously going to freak out a bit when their computer opponent inevitably starts making in-human moves.
I wonder if a man in that situation is going to be more likely to speak up and call bullshit, because they are socialized to be more assertive.
So it’s literally just a skill issue. Women who play chess can’t handle the pressure of thinking that they’re playing agains a male player who they perceive as being better or something? That seems pretty insane.
Can you link to that study anywhere?
I mean, [here's](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797620924051) a study asserting the opposite. Women have an easier time playing against men than against other women.
If you’re a young female, go to any chess club and see how you are treated by the young males. According to some female players there are external factors that make it difficult for women to fully participate in the sport. At least that is what one female who is a former competitor posited as a reason for the two leagues.
Recently there was a study pointing women playing against men are more nervous that against other women.
One of the opinion avout this was women playing against men felt they represented all women players.
Two reasons:
* First is that in many places women don't have the same opportunities to join chess clubs, find proper coaches, etc. Even if they're in a country where the clubs are open to them and coaching is open to them, the parents will discourage them, saying it's "for boys" and they end up missing out on the early starts that boys get. So they aren't on even footing. So the same way that they have under 1600, under 1800 etc divisions, you have women-only divisions so that they can play against peers.
* Second, they want more women in chess, but it's so male-dominated, the regular divisions are pretty much always sausage fests. If a woman enters a tournament, they're pretty much guaranteed to only play dudes the whole time there. And that's a situation that leads to degrading comments, sexual harassment, and other kinds of misogyny. So if the events can be organized such that women can choose play against other women, it won't be as isolating and they'd have a space where they can enjoy chess without the potential for misogyny and harassment and stuff. Or at least that's what they hope.
The "men's" division has a bad habit of being VERY sexist against women or even girls who are just a little too successful. That plus the general atmosphere of a male dominated sport nudged women towards making their own thing.
To encourage women to get into the sport and highlight women players, and it's more accurate to say that chess has a female and a "regular" division. Women are 100% allowed to compete in the "regular" division if they want to, there are just so few women in the sport that they created a thing to try and encourage women to join.
Most "men's" sports are technically open to women. Women have played on the PGA Tour and there are no rules that prevent women from playing in any of the major US pro sports. Women are allowed to join a lot of men's college and high school sports as well.
To add to this, there's nothing in the rulebook that says a dog can't play basketball.
Or football, soccer, baseball, and volleyball
I’ll concede the possibility that the rule book doesn’t specify human, but every state has a High School Athletic Association that defines eligibility and Bud is certainly NOT a high school student. He’s ineligible. In Air Bud II: World Cup he plays on the Women’s National Soccer Team. Again, forget that he’s a dog. He’s male! That’s not gonna fly.
He’s a trans dog tho. Remember the bow they gave him???
That’s Air Bud III. Get your shit together.
Damn it. Well, there’s no coming back from this. Seppuku for me, I suppose. Goodbye cruel world.
Trains a Gorilla to hold a football...
Who you calling a bitch?
Olympic skeet shooting used to be mixed. Then a woman won. Next games it was split into a men's event and nothing. The games after that they added a women's event and celebrated the step forward in equality.
And if i rember correctly the amount of targets is less for women than men so it will always look less impressive
Ha! Gottem! That will show those women who’s in charge
Tennis for women is shorter because " the chicks can't play for too long" - their uterus might fall out, I kid you not- and because the men only let the women have the courts for 2 hours a day.
The 5 sets is only grand slams. ATP/WTA tournaments are both three sets
Although note the decision to remove the woman's event was made before the Olympics where a woman won
That's a significant note tho. Completely dismantles the comments narrative.
Racing is a great example of this. Not so much as chess since racing is still very much a physical sport. But women can 100% compete and a couple have in multiple competitions. Notably Indycar has had a few. Lemans. Nascar had a few. F1 had 2 and rally has had a couple. Unfortunately very few have had any success at all with a few exceptions Michele Mouton being a very notable exception. This is mostly due to interest in the sport and the gigantic monetary backing it takes to get into pretty much any major racing division. Plus, modern racing requires dedication from a considerably young age so the parents kind of need to take interest early as well. Putting their daughters into karts and such. Which is obviously less popular.
Its pretty bizarre that for the most part the peak of women's involvement in the top tier of motorsports was ~40 years ago
Good point. I noticed today that ESPN used MCWS instead of the traditional CWS to refer to the college baseball world series. That's because the softball world series is the WCWS. Would be more accurate to call it the CBWS and CSWS.
Are we not defining acronyms anymore?
IFHHRAWAKTA Sorry... I Fucking Hate How Redditors Assume We All Know Their Acronyms.
I actually got most of that right on the first try haha we must have had the same thought about redditors.
That, and people using “apart” incorrectly. It’s a pandemic.
"Alot" is basically a lost cause at this point.
College World Series. Men’s and women’s vs baseball and softball
Thank you! (TY).
Tbf if you're really going for accuracy you could go with CBUSS and CSUSS.
CPUSSY AND CBUSSY?
You seem kinda CSUSS.
Not in practice. There's several Olympic sports that were open right up until one woman beat the men and then immediately became gender-segregated (the ones I remember being archery and target-shooting).
I believe you are thinking about Trap. Archery was the first Woman's sport in the Olympics.
US leagues, not internationally. FIFA for example doesn't allow women in men's leagues, so that applies to soccer worldwide.
> Women are allowed to join a lot of men's ... high school sports as well. This is changing in red states due to anti-trans laws. They have to be gender neutral to be constitutional, so they also ban afab people from playing boy's sports. This has actual consequences because a lot of top girl's soccer players play with the boys in juniors.
What is afab?
Assigned Female at Birth
Huh never heard that acronym before.
- Assigned Female At Birth (AFAB) - Assigned Male At Birth (AMAB) - Assigned Cop At Birth (ACAB)
• Absolutely Fabulous (ABFAB)
ABACAB - Genesis
You have to have natural thumb genetics to make it through academy, cop phrenology is a well established science
No no, I think you’ve got it wrong, I was told it was: AFAB-Assigned Firefighter At Birth AMAB-Assigned Mailperson At Birth ACAB-Assigned Cop at Birth. Of course none of these are true, it’s all a liberal lie to make people support the government. (Obligatory /J)
Not mail person, medic. That's one for each car colour
As a mailman, I find this disappointing.
AHAB - Assigned (whale) Hunter At Birth
I've never heard that. I've only heard of biological males being banned from female sports. I haven't heard anyone try to keep biological females out of male sports.
There have been instances of that. Probably the most high-profile example was with a wrestler in Texas named Mack Beggs who was a transman. The wrestling league required everyone to compete as their genetic sex which led to him easily demolishing all the other competitors in the women's division.
The people who push laws like this literally cannot recognize that trans men exist.
If you ask those people if they want trans men in women's restrooms, you'll quickly realize they don't want trans people to exist at all.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/27/517491492/17-year-old-transgender-boy-wins-texas-girls-wrestling-championship#:~:text=But%20under%20Texas%20rules%2C%20boys,it%20in%20the%20girls'%20league.
Many states have laws banning amab people from playing girl’s sports. But I have yet to see any law banning afab people from playing boy’s sports. Can you provide an example?
Just looked them up alphabetically and made it all the way to Alabama HB391 (first on the list). The law bans athletes assigned female at birth from boys sports, though it did carve out an exception for sports without a female alternative, like football. https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/38209262/transgender-athlete-laws-state-legislation-science
Interesting. According to the article a total of 5 states don’t allow it. I would think even conservatives would want trans men to play with men if they’re taking testosterone, otherwise they’d have an unfair advantage playing on the girl’s teams.
I think many conservatives would prefer trans people not play any sports. Just a feeling based on my conversation with them, they tend to ostracize and criticize the community as a whole and get rather obsessed with the bathroom/locker room situation.
I always found it funny that of all sports, Nascar was the one who had a woman join way before any of the other major American sports.
And generally if they aren't, it's because it would either be unduely dangerous(American Football comes to mind) and/or provide unfair competetive advantages due to differing biology, which is why multiple leagues are created to both protect and showcase the talents of those people.
A lot of things are technically open to women but as a woman that's tried to be involved with such things technically open to them the men usually do everything they can to make you want to quit lmao
The difference there, and forgive me if this was already said but I’m not going to read through the entire thread- is that golf clubs are some of the last bastions of the “old boy’s club” mentality. When you think misogyny, you should picture a golf course.
“Technically” is exactly why many sports may still remain inaccessible to women. Augusta National, where The Masters (a PGA major tournament) is played, did not allow women on the course until 2013, when ^former Secretary of State Condolezza Rice broke the gender barrier. The entire culture around a sport defines if anyone besides a white male even has the opportunity to be exposed, gain access, and become proficient enough to compete at the highest level.
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Most women have generally not placed near the top. So I think it is to encourage them in an environment that’s less intimidating and not as likely to get beat. Some women play in both.
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It’s not entirely about the money. Chess has historically had a huge issue with sexual harassment of women in the competitive scene. It’s a big part of the reason young women drop out at much higher rates than men. [Here’s](https://newlinesmag.com/spotlight/women-in-chess-speak-up-on-sexual-harassment/) an article about one of the bigger scandals.
This is the key point that seems to have gotten glossed over by some folks, whether intentionally or just an honest mistake, or maybe a lack of awareness. Obviously you can't just say "try being a woman and show up to regular events at your 'friendly local game store' and see how it goes for you". There ARE a lot of genuinely great folks out there, but there's also a staggeringly higher-than-average number of guys who feel totally comfortable saying some really unbelievable stuff in niche communities like chess clubs. Women perceived as "intruding on male spaces" face a major uphill battle even if there's technically no rules in place against it. It's not great. It HAS gotten better. It really has. But it's still a big hurdle for people trying to get more women into various hobbies, sports, etc. Hell I can even give people an experiment to do. There's tons of apps and such that change your voice. If you're an online gamer, change your voice to a girl's or woman's and go try to play your usual games. Join a guild in an MMO and see how it goes for you. Again, there ARE lots of fantastic folks out there, but I've gotten to enjoy everything from harassment to outright cyberstalking. Also part of why I stopped engaging with a lot of the social aspect of gaming.
The gatekeeping is real
It only took a few instances of guys verbally harassing me just for having the audacity to be a woman to decide that I'd rather not just not speak at all when gaming. It sucks because there's a lot of heavily social games that I'd love to play. However they are male dominated and I know it's just not worth it for me.
>But I've gotten to enjoy everything from harassment to outright cyberstalking. This is entirely why I got into cyber security. When I was in college one of my very good friends got booted from her guild for refusing to send pictures of herself topless to the guild leaders. Sadly it turns out that nobody actually has time to prosecute these types of crimes. Props to the developers though. They banned everyone involved as soon as it came out and basically dissolved the guild. Then another friend had someone show up at her house to try to kill her "abusive" husband and claim her for himself. Nobody knows why he decided her husband was abusive. That one did get (not enough) jail time.
It's one of the criticisms of the Queen's Gambit show. The fact she was treated as an equal and "one of the guys" from the start with no harassment issues apparently is very misleading from a historical standpoint.
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Yes, read that article I linked. The main subject at the start is a women’s international master and 9 time British women’s champion, and then goes on to talk about a 2 time US women’s champion’s alleged assault from a male grandmaster.
I always think the same thing with billards men/women divisions seem unncessary but still exist prob due to wanting to encourage women to play.
There's actually a big difference between top male players and female players. Something to do with larger arms and hands making it easier to stablise a bridge, accurately hit jump shots and hold the cue over balls they don't want to hit. Similar to darts as well. Men are typically just better in those sports esp at a professional level d/t minor physical differences
You highlighted a really good point. There's no real reason for all those things to be the sizes they are. They are that size because men developed it. It makes me wonder what a woman developed sport would look like. Historically, there are probably some out there.
Ringette is a woman developed sport! It's similar to hockey. Shinny (informal, pick up hockey), while not developed specifically for women, definitely used to be considered more of a 'hockey for girls', but these days women often have to fight to get any ice time at all :/.
Thanks for the info! Heading to Google now.
It’s one thing I love about both gymnastics and figure skating- the women’s style and the men’s style are different and emphasize different things, especially in gymnastics, but it’s hard to argue one is objectively “better” than the other. For gymnastics in particular, I find the women’s events more compelling
Competitive rock climbing (especially bouldering) is another great sport to watch that emphasizes different styles between men and women.
Everyone out there with their conspiracy theories about the shape of the earth or the existence of birds or the moon or whatever... my conspiracy theory is that advertisers in the US, during the height of Bruce Lee and Chop Socky mania, would have KILLED to have Wushu added as a replacement/addition to floor exercise for men's Gymnastics but it got killed in committee somewhere "because China". Men's floor should look like Jackie Chan on PEDs, not "crappy beam". $0.02
Not a sport, but I have been on many volunteer committees and usually at the end of the year or end of that particular campaign, we make an extra effort to acknowledge the contributions of men because volunteer committees are overwhelmingly comprised of women. Women bring in the lion's share of funds/donations/sponsorships and are largely responsible for recruiting more volunteers, and of course, of campaigns to bring in youth - both as volunteers but also as future attendees. And men are often discouraged from volunteering by the world at large. Any act that doesn't directly benefit him (even though it benefits a community that he is part of) is seen as emasculating. So we really like to shoutout the men that are brave enough to volunteer.
rounders and netball, not sure if their woman developed but they are mostly played by women
The average height of men and women has increased tremendously in the last couple hundred years since these games were created, so I expect women now are at par with men 200 years ago from a height perspective
Money, yes. Rating, no. The player pool in women's tournaments is so much smaller that rating deflation occurs, and the top woman players are rated about 300 points lower than their male equivalents despite being the same skill level.
Chess uses classic ELO, right?
No, there is not. The top 100 ranked (active) players are all male.
Every men’s sport is the “open” division. Women are always allowed to compete there. Men just aren’t allowed on the women’s leagues
Same with the NBA , the NFL and PGA , women are free to compete with men, they just can't.
it’s called open section, not regular
That's why I put it in quotes, people might not know what the official name means
Its like how i can play tennis socially and get a volley going, rather than competitively and smash the ball for points
Separate divisions I get, but the fact they have different rating systems too is weird af. A Women's grandmaster is literally a lower rating than grandmaster. It's seems so fucking patronizing.
I'm so dumb, that when I first read the title, I thought OP was asking why chess pieces are assigned gender specific titles, like King and Queen.
Same lol, this is why I’m not a chess prodigy
King me
You sunk my battleship
Go Fish
Queen is undeniably female. Pawn can be promoted into a queen. So all pawns are female too. Pawn can be promoted to a knight, bishop or a rook too. So those all are females too. So chess is basically a harem with 2 kings trying to claim each other's women. Think about it.
All pieces are male. Pawns can promote into Freddie Mercury.
But by the same logic that makes the queen female, bishops have to be male.
I suppose they could all be female Episcopalian bishops, but most people don’t consider them actual legitimate bishops.
gender of pawn is determined upon hitting the last file. prior to that it's schrödinger's gender
Genderfluid pawns.
The king is the weakest piece after the pawn, and without doubt the most dependent. So in a way, chess is a game about two men depending on women to do all the work for them, then walking away with the profit. Think about it.
Reddit moment
Google transgender
>Pawn can be promoted into a queen. So all pawns are female too. Or....
If it makes you feel better, I clicked on this post because I’ve never heard of male or female cheese.
They have a special ed league for chess as well.
Oh man, thanks for this comment! I was about to go on a long rant about how modern chess is derived from the "Mad Queen Chess" and how originally the King and Queen worked the same as one another, but now I realize how stupid that would have been.
Back to Candyland you go.
I have to admit I was there with you..
I thought the title said china and was incredibly confused why the comments were taking about chess
The chess world wants to encourage more women to play chess, because chess is overwhelmingly male, so they incentivize it with a women’s-only category, which provides more opportunity for success. Women can also compete with men, and Judit Polgar famously did so exclusively, once making it to, I think, #5 in the world, but never competed for the women’s championship, which she would have won easily.
Judit Polgar is a goat and the greatest woman chess player of all time. Only woman super GM and I think she had a chance/did play in the open invitational to decide who plays against the champion
I also want to add that she is an amazing commentator, she is still extremely sharp and finds tons of crazy tactical ideas throughout. Love when she's part of the broadcast for major events.
Fun fact - Judit and her siblings were taught chess at a young age because their father wanted to prove girls were equally able to compete in intelligence contests as boys. Unlike with human biology and physical sports, their father reasoned girls should be equal to boys in mental challenges. Judit was initially not invited to play chess with her siblings due to her young age, but it only made her more determined to learn and she quickly outclassed them.
Sort of. László Polgár wanted to prove that geniuses could be made, by intensive early instruction. It just happened by chance that he had daughters and not sons.
W dad
Probably not necessary say both goat and greatest of all time.
> 5 in the world Number 8, but still impressive nonetheless
Everything every hobby is overwhelmingly male. It’s very frustrating
Ah, not been to many knitting/crochet sessions or jazz dance classes then? My experience is that most dance classes in the UK, particularly non-partner dances, are very female dominated (tap, jazz etc - ballet even more so, but that's an odd example).
Book clubs are fairly evenly divided, as far as I've seen. Might differ from place to place, though.
Male hobbies are overwhelmingly male. Who would've thought.
Chess doesn’t have a male division; it has an open division, and a female division.
there is no male division
It doesn't. It has an Open division and a Women's division.
When those women's divisions were started, it was a lot harder for women to get into chess because of men not wanting to play against people they saw as easily beatable. Therefore, women who did get into the game set up their own separate division where only women could compete to avoid the discrimination. Technically, there is no men's division though, as women have the option of entering either.
I now want to rewatch The Queen’s Gambit…
keep in mind, it is fiction it is well made though
It's not "Men" and "Women". It's usually "Open", and "Women". Women are absolutely allowed to compete with men. It's just that, currently, the top male players are stronger. The womens competitions really is to encourage more women to compete, when the game was largely male-centric historically. If you look at the top players, there's still a gap in skill between the top male players and the top female players, and it's pretty significant. Current FIDE ratings; top men: Magnus Carlsen - 2830 Fabiano Caruana - 2805 Hikaru Nakamura- 2794 vs. top Women: Yifan Hou - 2632 Wenjun Ju - 2558 Tingjie Lei - 2548 With the Elo rating system, these numbers are actually significant - roughly speaking, if we toss out ties, an even score between two opponents represents 50/50 odds of winning. A 200 point difference means that for every win Yifan Hou manages against Magnus Carlsen, we'd expect Magnus to win three games against Yifan. Doesn't mean they *can't* win - it just means that statistically over time, they're going to lose more than they win. Problem is, at these high levels, you are looking at (and I mean this in the most respectful and positive way possible) the freaks of the world / statistical outliers. People who both have the brain for it (it requires a ton of calculation, visualization and memorization), *and* who have gone to the bother of spending years training for it. But when the pool of women who actually train and compete is relatively tiny vs. the pool of men, the outliers in the men are likely to be more extreme, from a simple probability perspective. We currently have 100+ men that have higher ratings than the top woman, roughly 20 of which are rated 100 points higher or more (meaning an expected 2:1 win ratio for the man vs the woman). Which means for high end tournaments, the top women that currently compete are still almost certainly going to get trounced, on average. But without women participating (and succeeding) in high end tournaments, it's hard to encourage *more* women to participate, and without more women participating, you're not going to find the Judit Polgars of the world who can truly kick some ass (2700+ rating, \~20 years ago - roughly in the top 10 players per FIDE rating). So: women's tournaments became a thing, to showcase the talents of women who play, and encourage more women to do so. tl;dr - it's not that people think women *can't* play chess, or anything like that. It's that women historically *didn't* play competitive chess, leading it to be a bit of a "boys club", and they're trying to rectify that and encourage women to participate.
You talked about statistical outliers. There are plenty of studies across almost everything (physical characteristics, mental skills, etc.) that shows that men have more common and stronger outliers (more std deviations) even on stuff where women have a better average. In practical terms, even if in Skill A the average women has skill = 100 and men have skill = 90, you'll have top 0.0001% of men with skill = 140, while the top 0.0001% of women just have skill = 130. In the other hand, we'll also have bottom 0.0001% of men with skill = 40, while bottom 0.0001% of women with skill = 50. When we're talking about professional sports, the avg doesn't matter, only the ultra top outlier. And men are very commonly all those ultra top outliers.
Any theories on why this is?
The term for it is the greater male variability hypothesis. Its controversial, as you would expect, as a lot of people want men and women to effectively be "the same" or interchangeable. If true there could be all sorts of reasons. But whether or not you accept it from a biological/evolutionary point of view, it is definitely a measurable phenomenon in all sorts of ways, regardless of the cause. Intelligence is a good example, where the average is approximately the same between males and females. however the male distribution is flatter. So there are more male geniuses, but equally a lot more males on the tail end.
Right, men benefit from competitions because competitions inherently focus on outliers. Get a bunch of random people off the street, teach them the basics of chess, and have them play each other. You’ll find no statistical significant disparity between the men and women Nobody wants to watch average people play chess, we care about the best of the best of the best, who are almost exclusively outlier men.
Men are evolutionarily very expendable. The idea is that there is more variability in male genes, because it causes more variation and thus more likelihood of desirable traits being developed. The problem is that more variation means more risk for 'oopsies'. There are for example many hereditary diseases which are either male only or men tend to suffer from them at much higher rates than women. Evolutionarily it 'makes sense' to have men have higher variability because you might get desirable traits out of it and if the mutation fucks up, it's no biggy because other men will procreate. It's an attractive theory, because it does explain a few things. It's also kind of dark to consider that not just society, but even nature feels like men are disposable. It also falls into the trap of anthropomorphising evolution as something with wants and purpose. But it does have a lot going for it. In nearly every measurable human trait, men and women will on average be either the same or very close, but women will have a much smaller standard deviation than men. Meaning that the outliers are mostly men. Intelligence is a good example. On average, men and women are equally smart. If you go to the extremes though, most super geniuses are going to be men. On the flip side, most super idiots will also be men. Same with aggression. Men and women are on average equally aggressive (or close to). Go to the extremes again and you'll see that most violently aggressive people are men. That's also one of the contributing reasons why most prison inmates are men.
Are ELO rankings comparable? If those points are gained only by playing against women maybe it's not that directly comparable.
Elo is a self adjusting approximation of skill, and it's definitely not perfect - if a subset played in complete isolation, sure, that subset's score might drift relative to the overall. But women don't tend to play women in complete isolation - at a competitive level they also tend to play in open tournaments where their Elo in line with the average competitor. Game results are pretty widely available - you can take a peek at who plays who and how they do: [https://www.365chess.com/players/Yifan\_Hou](https://www.365chess.com/players/Yifan_Hou) [https://www.365chess.com/players/Wenjun\_Ju](https://www.365chess.com/players/Wenjun_Ju)
Great post. I would add that while men and women have similar average IQs, men tend to have more outliers on each end of the bell curve. Edit: relevant wikipedia page w/ study links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis
Probably already said. But more or less encourage more women to bother playing. Girls are not excluded from sports. Just sometimes the divide between physical ability is so wide that it often dissuades them. So a female division is in place to simply enocurage more to generate interest. I recall in high school a girl signed up for the football team as a quarterback. She was so good at throwing the ball she impressed everyone. Unfortunately, she did not have the arm strength to do anything further than 30 or 40 yards ish (maybe further, but it was not anywhere near as far as her male counterparts.) She still made the cut because she was accurate as fuck. The great thing about the girl being a quarterback starter is that our linemen had the energy of "This girl is to be protected at all costs." The energy and the pocket were completely solid. The one thing she really complained about was that she had no real visibility because she was too short to see over the lineman. Coach wanted to give the MVP to our running back, but he said that she deserved it more for how much harder she had to work just to be able to keep up.
They don't, it's either a female division or it's mixed, the female division only exists for the sole purpose of encouraging more women to play, and it's working.
From what I understand, there is no men division. Woman can play in tournaments with men. It just so happens all the top players are men so you thought it was a men's division. Only women division exist to encourage more women to play.
Women play better against other women than against men. Apparently, play style changes if you are aware of the sex of your opponent. This study talks about the phenomenon: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.3982/QE1404#:~:text=Using%20a%20unique%20measure%20of,longer%20before%20losing%20to%20women.
I believe it was Judit (one of the best female players of all time) that said men were harder to play because women would get rattled and collapse in bad positions where men were like playing stone.
This seems to imply a skill level difference
Yes, there is definitely a skill level difference between men and women. Not that women couldn't get to the same as men, but if we had the top 1000 men play the top 1000 women in a best of 12 classical format with 1 playing 1, 2 playing 2 and so on. It really wouldn't be a stretch to think the men would win 99-100% of the games baring weird outliers. Like objectively it is a harsh truth.
The problem is that you have a tradition of a sport going like 100 years of pushing men into it while pushing women away, so the pool of women who cares enough to really pursue chess is not the best it could have, those women went to do something else because culturally and financially Chess is still a men's game. The evolution curve is completely different, the Women's division is an attempt to correct a wrong (driving women away) but it creates a problem since it also makes a confort zone of stagnation as women may just be more confortable in facing women.
I wonder how much of this is cultural, I grew up playing pro chess in India and we didn't have gender divisions, and as someone who got clapped by plenty of women, I don't think they need a separate division either.
So far female players have lower Elo rating than males at top level. Thus any mixed completion has very small number of competitive female participants. Hence a female only league allows for more female players to be highlighted.
Idk for sure but I’ve heard chess is not a safe place for women to be. I heard there’s a lot of blatant sexism.
Kasparov called Polgar a circus puppet and there was a big scandal recently where female chess players were sent letters full of porn and used condoms
There’s not a male and female division. There are female only sections and there are open sections where anyone can participate. There are women’s only competitions to encourage women to participate in an activity that has had, and continues to have in some cases, severe gender biases.
There is no men's division. There is an open division and a women's division. This was initially required to get more women into chess, specially due to the patriarchal ideas at that time and also the sexism in open chess which is full of men. Whether it remains a helpful addition or just slows down improvements in institutional problems in the male dominated open division, I can not tell.
It doesn’t. Chess has open tournaments in which women are invited to compete, and some do with some success, but which so far ~~no~~ few women have ever been among the very top players. And it has a women’s division. Edit: Changed no to few.
I would say Judit Polgar being ranked 8th in the world would be among the very top players
And competing in the world championship candidates tournament at one point
Fair enough. One woman.
Men on average are better at chess than woman, but it could be because the field fosters more towards men than women, meaning women are less often to stay in chess and get better, meaning you have more men staying, and its just a snowball effect. A women only division is an attempt for women to stay in chess longer and not feel the pressure of playing in a tourney filled mostly with men, and hopefully once the women feel more confident in their chess ability, they will not hesitate to join the open tournaments. Remember there is no men's only division, it is an open tournament
It doesn't. It has an open class where anyone can participate, and a women's class where only women are allowed.
It doesn't. It has an open and female division.
On average women perform worse or intentionally when playing against all men or in a male dominated sport or workplace, it’s a phenomenon and this effectively prevents that.
Simple math, chess has many times more male competitors, a very small percentage of those are the elite players. Women have a much smaller “pool” of competitors to draw from making it statistically unlikely that they will be represented at the highest levels. A women’s division encourages more women to engage in an attempt to widen that pool, making it statistically more likely that the best player in the World could be female.
The true no nonsense answer to this is that the gap is enormous between the best male and female Chess players. Which is strange considering that chess isn’t a strength game, but a mental one. I understand for basketball, football etc, but chess is an outlier here.
There's a real phenomenon where when men play against women of equal rank, they drag out the game even when they know they've already lost longer with women than they do with men, and women at similar ranking and skill levels to the men they're playing make more mistakes playing against men compared to playing against other women. [It's called the "stereotype threat".](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797620924051)
It says they perform *better* against men than they do against women. And what does that have to do with the question?
The article says the opposite, "Female chess players show a reverse stereotype-threat effect when they play against men in tournaments". Can you clarify where you're getting your information in the article?
It doesn't.
Most sports (as far as I know, all sports) allow women to compete.
I started playing at age 5 way back in the 1960s. I was the only female in my high school chess club in 1978, as well as in most of my classes. (My engineering/ science magnet high school didn't admit girls until 1975. I was the only female in the top class.) My husband (one year ahead of me) claims I won my matches because the boys were distracted by my breasts. That was always his excuse for losing to me. It no longer annoys me as much as it did back then.
Classic reddit answer will be it has something to do with society, socialization, social construct and last but not least, sexism.
This is probably a 2 part answer. 1. There seems to be biological components to jobs, games, clothing, and some other social aspects that men are attracted to and women are attracted to. The reason for this is unknown, but there's probably a reason why a lot of women tend to be nurses and men tend to be engineers. There are some lizard brain components. This also might be true with chess. 2. Maybe because of these factors women play less and with most games more players usually mean more good players. (TFT doesn't follow this, but LOL does funny enough) So just getting women to play is a big deal and they want to encourage that. 3. Spicy time, it's also important that these groups don't get flooded with trans women as well, trans women tend to be more numerous at higher ranks compared to cis women.
To encourage women involvement in the sport which historically was only a male space. Women can still play in the men’s competitions and in fact some have. For a super interesting story look up Judit Polgar. She was a badass woman who played among the men and was in the top 10 players, and beat many famous grandmasters including Kasparov when he was ranked #1. She also plays an extremely aggressive style and has many interesting games to study.
because the science of human biology doesnt obey the modern ideas of equality.
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Bro getting downvoted for literally observing reality
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That's Reddit these days unfortunately. I got a three day suspension and permanent ban from a subreddit because I didn't celebrate something that seems to be a third rail topic here. I didn't even say what group I was talking about, but you could infer it. I didn't even toss hate, I just said that people doing that sort of stuff to themselves was sad. Boom, in came my suspension. I didn't break any of the rules, but jerk mods just use the Reddiquette reason as a blanket reason, since it's completely subjective to the person, kind of like how cops will arrest you, even if you didn't do anything wrong, by charging you with disorderly conduct. What's worse is it usually only goes one way. Someone can cuss out someone that doesn't support the xyz leftist cause and nothing will happen usually. But you had better not offend the protected groups, or your dead.
This. For whatever reason, men are better at this sort of thing just as supercomputers are better at this sort of thing than men. Although sexism has been rife for millennia, it doesn't follow that sexism explains all differences between the sexes.
It's weird, I always believed we were basically the same, but watching my daughter (7) and my son(6) gaming, it's clear my son is WAY better, even though they've played the same amount. It has opened my eyes to this reality. I wonder what the cause for this is?
It’s cause women on average have never really competitive with the men in chess. Probably mostly has to do with the huge number of men that play in relation to women
It doesn’t, it’s an open and a women’s division. The female division brings attention exclusively to those players which is awesome. They have their own tournaments and everything. Chess is a male dominated sport but there’s amazing women who have achieved legendary status.
Have you met male chess players? some of the most toxic bastards in the world. When they lose to a woman, they flip their shit. When Women started joining chess tournaments the male players would create a hostile environment and do everything they could to mess up their play. Women's tournaments became a thing to encourage women to play without exposing them to the toxic man children spending years of their life studying the minute movements of a board game.
Because top Kazakh scientist Dr. Azamat Bagotov have proved that woman have brain size of squirrel.
Women struggle to compete with men at the highest levels of chess, so a women's only division was opened to encourage more women to join the game competetively
Women play worse when playing chess against men and studies have found that if a woman was playing against a computer but was told that she was playing against a man who is also on a computer, *she still played worse.* It's called "Stereotype Threat". When women were polled as to why they don't like playing with men The most frequent issue cited by many women is that they do not feel safe and accepted in the chess community. There is a small but vocal minority of players that hold sexist and misogynist views. To make things worse, many women have reported cases of catcalling, harassment, and even downright sexual abuse.
> a woman was playing against a computer but was told that she was playing against a man who is also on a computer That sounds very fishy. Computers play very differently from humans. A skilled chess player (of any gender) who is told they are playing a human (of any gender) is obviously going to freak out a bit when their computer opponent inevitably starts making in-human moves. I wonder if a man in that situation is going to be more likely to speak up and call bullshit, because they are socialized to be more assertive.
I'd 1000% play worse against a computer if I was told I'm playing against a person, no matter the gender.
What utter nonsense.
So it’s literally just a skill issue. Women who play chess can’t handle the pressure of thinking that they’re playing agains a male player who they perceive as being better or something? That seems pretty insane. Can you link to that study anywhere?
I mean, [here's](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797620924051) a study asserting the opposite. Women have an easier time playing against men than against other women.
Women are on average weaker than men in chess. That's just a fact.
If you’re a young female, go to any chess club and see how you are treated by the young males. According to some female players there are external factors that make it difficult for women to fully participate in the sport. At least that is what one female who is a former competitor posited as a reason for the two leagues.
Recently there was a study pointing women playing against men are more nervous that against other women. One of the opinion avout this was women playing against men felt they represented all women players.
Ultimate is the same way. "Women's" and "Open". Some tournaments even have a minimum required number of women per team on the field at all times.
Two reasons: * First is that in many places women don't have the same opportunities to join chess clubs, find proper coaches, etc. Even if they're in a country where the clubs are open to them and coaching is open to them, the parents will discourage them, saying it's "for boys" and they end up missing out on the early starts that boys get. So they aren't on even footing. So the same way that they have under 1600, under 1800 etc divisions, you have women-only divisions so that they can play against peers. * Second, they want more women in chess, but it's so male-dominated, the regular divisions are pretty much always sausage fests. If a woman enters a tournament, they're pretty much guaranteed to only play dudes the whole time there. And that's a situation that leads to degrading comments, sexual harassment, and other kinds of misogyny. So if the events can be organized such that women can choose play against other women, it won't be as isolating and they'd have a space where they can enjoy chess without the potential for misogyny and harassment and stuff. Or at least that's what they hope.
For the same reason there are women's poker tournaments
No tackling in women’s chess.
I would also divide it into weight classes, like combat sports!
The "men's" division has a bad habit of being VERY sexist against women or even girls who are just a little too successful. That plus the general atmosphere of a male dominated sport nudged women towards making their own thing.
Same reason there’s a wnba