Feminist Pub VII - Chat, questions, random thoughts too small for a thread ...

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

Just setting this up while we finish off the last few posts on the old thread. Come in and pull up a bar stool!

No buffy that wasn't my intention at all I merely stand up for chess, I'm sure other sports have sexism problems but I don't pretend to know enough about that to comment. And I don't hold a grudge, so yes, friends

Men are in fact not discriminated against in chess.

It started out that there was chess, a game that only men could play. Then instead of allowing women to play "real" chess (the men's game) they created "women's chess" and hived them off into that category, same as they do with football, tennis etc. The good thing is, chess is one step ahead of the other sports in that women are now allowed to play the "real" game, and at the same time "women's chess" still exists.

It remains a fact that as long as the men's game came first and then a "women's" game came along the men's game will always be seen as the "real" game.

It is telling that there isn't men's chess, women's chess and then mixed chess. Just chess and "women's chess."

What I would say is that its no coincidence that the only truly world class female chess player, Judith Polgar, refused to play in women's events. In chess you need to play the best opposition you can in order to improve and nobody who plays only the current crop of top women will ever reach the standard of the best in "real" chess.

But what are FIDE to do? If women's chess is disbanded, inevitably many female chess players will quit entirely when they go from winning tournaments to the obscurity of being hundreds of places from the top. So would that make women's participation in chess even worse?

*Judit (forgot to set my spell checker to Hungarian)

Apologies for getting the facts wrong about chess, if things have changed. I was thinking about the Polgar sisters and their struggle with Hungarian authorities in their early career.

However, to say "there is chess, and then there is women's chess" as evidence that chess is not sexist, is missing the point. To say "there is chesss, and then there is women's chess" demonstrates that chess is still sexist. As the other posters have pointed out.

Anyway. Can't rant too much now - more meetings to come in office and home internet broken again! Ranting on phones is just not the same...

In my local league there is no distinction at the youngest levels, the local chess school takes girls and boys, the district league has no gender distinction, and yet of the 50ish players who have turned out for the local chess school teams in the league (playing against adult teams), there have been 2 girls, who happen to have brothers who play for the same team. Surely this is not just a statistical anomoly? Perhaps until women's chess is abolished at elite level girls will always look up and infer ideas about gender distinctions in chess?

Oh, that's reassuring that there's not a distinction.

I think you're right - as long as 'women's chess' exists as a thing, little girls are not going to see it as something they can do (or their parents' aren't).

It's the same with formula 1, as I understand it (and ignoring some guff about women's necks that always comes up ... and is counterbalanced rather nicely by the advantage women get for being, on average, smaller and lighter). Girls don't get taken karting, on the whole (and I've seen karting centres advertise almost exclusively to boys/men). Oddly enough, this was brought up a few years ago on Top Gear as one of the major reasons there aren't more women F1 drivers.

Btw, er, ignore this if gratuitous self-promotion irritates (it's not really self promotion, I just had to do with getting this going but the actual cool women's stuff on there is not mine) ... but there's currently a hashtag 'artbywomen' where people are sharing images of/links about women's art, especially folk art, because it's so often ignored by the establishment.

Bit like girl's football innit?

It actually send the message that football is only for wierdo girls. While not having girl's football, means boys dominate it.

I've just remembered years ago I was at some conference or other where there was lots of leisure time and down time and they laid on chess boards etc. One bloke asked if anyone wanted to play and I was the only taker. So er, he lost interest.

Don't know if he thought it was beneath him to play with a mere woman or if he was scared I'd beat him.

He sounds a charmer.

On the Sexism of Football Scholars and Sports Critics

"I was in a sports bar having an argument with an “intellectual” who wanted me to agree to his premise – that women are weaker - an argument that I also had with boys on the school bus when I was 8 years old. This perspective does not mature as boys turn into men; men either shed that attitude or it cements into their brain structure, like some kind of thought-killing plaque. I refuse to have ANY conversation about sports that naturalizes women as the weaker sex as a precondition for entering into the discussion."

I love Jennifer Doyle.

Very Dull Rant #1: Training for women in leadership as a means of advancing women's careers. Now, if I understand the world correctly, there is systematic discrimination against women as authoritative figures. That's one big reason why women don't advance to high positions (my information and statistics are all about academia but I suspect it's much the same in many places). Giving women specific training to say "if you only did things this way" or "if you only present yourself that way" or "if you only comb your hair this way" seems to me to be telling women that it's their fault they don't get promoted because they are doing it wrong. Where the training ought to be is for people in the positions of hiring and promoting to learn how not to discriminate.

AIBU?

YADNBU!

This really pisses me off too.

I'd love to see mixed teams in school sports, so Eni Aluko could play alongside her brother Sone (f'r instance). I'd like this to be endorsed by the relevant sports governing bodies. Pretty soon it would be seen as the norm for the best players, regardless of sex, to be playing alongside each other.

"But what are FIDE to do? If women's chess is disbanded, inevitably many female chess players will quit entirely when they go from winning tournaments to the obscurity of being hundreds of places from the top. So would that make women's participation in chess even worse?"

Hikaru, do you know what the relative prize money is? In the article on snooker I linked above, Reanne Evans would have received £3,000 if knocked out in the second round of the snooker world title in which mostly folk with penises play; she got £400 for winning the snooker world for which people with vaginas compete. So she's better off losing in the penis-dominated game than winning in the vagina dominated game.

I'm guessing that champions in women's chess are, by and large, more obscure than champions (with penises) in chess and that the relative obscurity of reaching the third round in chess or whatever may be similar.

Apologies for repeated genital references - it's been that kind of day.

Oh but it is women's fault they don't get to the top, because of the silly choices, innit?

But seriously, that is a genuinely brilliant point and is what we should be lobbying for in our companies and organisations. Next time I'm asked to feed back re women in business courses, I'll be pointing that out. (Seeing as how they all think I'm a loon anyway, so I have nothing to lose. )

Nobody outside the top dozen or so chess players really makes a good living out of it, although it's a globally popular sport it is of course a bit boring to watch so the audience and sponsorship is limited!

There's some information on earnings and where they came from on this web site, with the top 10 men, and the top (active) woman player:

www.pogonina.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2417

By far the biggest prize funds in both Women's and 'mixed' chess comes from the world championship, which only involves two players.

Bear in mind that Hou Yifan is well outside the top 100 players on ranking, and she is significantly better than most other top women players. So without women's chess, no current woman player would make any money of note (and probably not even break even given the globetrotting involved for major events) playing chess in competition with men, although there are of course one or two women like Natalia Pogonina who make a living out of being mediocre female chess players who market themselves on their other, er, saleable qualities.

There is a 'women in leadership' 'thing' where I work. I was told to email a short CV and a photo of myself, and they would match me with a mentor. I met my mentor a couple of times and each time she said 'You really don't make the best of yourself, do you?'

I am there to work, to get a job done. I am not decorative, if they want decorative people in positions of power within my organisation, then I might as well leave now

Ah well, roll on uni!

Come to think of it there's another 'mixed' even coming up, although it's likely to be a one off since they're struggling to find players willing to pay the $1000 entry fee, it has quite big prizes by chess standards, but then again most chess tournaments cost very little to enter:

millionairechess.com/tournament/prize-fund/