It will never happen - bonkers women’s chess story

[NotBadConsidering]

You have to laugh:

https://www.bbc.com/sport/africa/65280560

I read this last night. The organisers became suspicious because he didn't speak, and had masculine shoes (whatever they are).
The perspective of the BBC here is odd though. This report is clearly "cheating man". Yet in other cases, it's not.

Why on earth is chess sex-segregated as a sport in the first place? It's a game of intellect - absolutely zero physical effort needed. Do the organisers think women aren't intelligent enough to compete against men?

The BBC would be delighted with him had he just uttered the magic 'I am a woman' words.

I suspect in Kenya it’s because women and girls will have traditionally had fewer opportunities to learn the game so are “behind” in their game development. So this gives women an opportunity to compete against women and win money for themselves.

I guess because chess is a pursuit in which for various systemic reasons women and girls are underrepresented. So, this event is an opportunity to encourage participation by women. In the same way that there's no reason women can't be engineers but they are underrepresented so there are initiatives to try to tackle this.

NotBad Turkish That makes sense, thank you.

How can you tell the difference between a man donning womanface for unacceptable reasons and a man donning womanface for reasons [you might consider to be] fair?

How can you tell the difference between a woman and a male person without genetic or genital checks?

🤯

🤔

I'm not entirely certain that there aren't brain differences that alter the mean and standard deviation of certain types of thinking. It doesn't really matter what the root causes are, if the end result is that women are performing differently to men. We really don't understand enough about the brain to open up the black box, so can only go by the output, which is that the best men at chess consistently outperform the best women. Only 3 women have ever ranked in the top 100 players. The best ever female player, Judit Polgar, was ranked 10th overall in the world.

I strongly suspect that women could be as good at chess as men. eg a couple of women have won the fields medal for maths. but there's no doubt that women are hugely under-represented, more than justifying separate categories.

Kenya obviously isn't any kind of bastion of women's rights, the ongoing high rates of FGM are atrocious, but it arguably does say something when the in general far less enlightened society is able to simply say 'you're a man' and it's instantly recognised as, yknow, a fair cop.

How can you tell the difference between a woman and a male person without genetic or genital checks?

Yes, isn’t it fascinating how this man went to extraordinary lengths to disguise his appearance, covering himself from head to ankle and everyone could still tell he was a man. The key, obviously, is the feet, not the genitals. He should have painted his toenails. 🙄

I imagine him sitting at home now saying “And I would have got away with it too, if it wasn’t for the masculine shoes😡.”

I really need to see what he was wearing now.

the voice (or here lack thereof) is the real giveaway, per the stoning scene in 'the life of Brian'.

Brain differences?! Well if that’s true, it’s undiscovered. More likely women are left to deal with kids and housework so have less free time to peruse these things than men do.

Judit Polgár is an unusual case, because of her (and her sisters's) extraordinary childhood, but yes she broke several records previously held by males including youngest player ever to break into the FIDE top 100 players rating list and youngest ever Grandmaster.

According to Wikipedia:

Kasparov expressed early doubts: "She has fantastic chess talent, but she is, after all, a woman. It all comes down to the imperfections of the feminine psyche. No woman can sustain a prolonged battle." Later in life, however, after he had lost a rapid game against Polgár himself in 2002, Kasparov revised his opinion: "The Polgárs showed that there are no inherent limitations to their aptitude—an idea that many male players refused to accept until they had unceremoniously been crushed by a twelve-year-old with a ponytail."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r

I don't know if there are cognitive differences that result in different chess results. If there are, the elite game is where you would see it most, and that does fit the pattern.

But I would say that from my experience with amateur chess with kids, it's nothing to do with girls not being encouraged or treated poorly. If anything they go out of their way to encourage girls, and they are able to play just like schoolboys, they aren't sent home to do laundry, at least in the west.

What I would say though is that you see kids come in and learn the game, and some have fun, but there are a few that are clearly enchanted and get very serious about it, and that tends to be weighted towards boys. And of the girls that do get involved, there is a significant number who bow out around adolescence, and it seems to be because their social lives take precedence over playing. It's not that those girls don't want to play at all, they still enjoy the game, but they don't obsess over it like the kids who go on to win tournaments as teens. They talk about it all the time, read books about it, spend a lot of time memorizing games, play on the computer, etc. Those obsessive kids are overwhelmingly boys.

I think gender stereotypes play a part too. Girls are heavily bombarded with messages of how to be and what to do to be worthy of being a girl.

Boys get that too but there's more wriggle room to be competitive and nerdish and thus get into chess.

From seeing my own boys grow up they get a lot of "battle" messages in stereotyped toys and games. Chess can be seen as part of that.

I joined chess club as a teen but drifted away as there weren't many girls.

This is actually ironic really as a country that had high FGM incidences is calling a bloke out on pretending to be a woman and a chest.

you can always tell a bloke dressing as a woman. Maybe this was Kier Starmers 1%??? We all still looking for him/her

I don't think anyone is suggesting that there is an intellectual/capability difference in chess ability based on sex.
The point was that he was pretending to be a new, inexperienced player in a group that he thought wouldn't rumble him.

It's not undiscovered. It's known. But it's not a difference in average intelligence (there is one but it's miniscule), it's a difference in distribution. Women tend to cluster more towards the average, man are spread out more in both directions. Or to put it another way, in any given population large enough for the trend to show, there will be more very smart boys than very smart girls, but also more very stupid boys than very stupid girls. The mean of both groups will be almost the same however.

Unless you are debating the reasons for the pattern rather than that it exists, in which case yes - that's an ongoing topic. But I don't think housework can account for a smaller distribution of IQ, (Nor do full time jobs, of which men are more likely to be doing, allow for a lot of free time for chess, fwiw).

In any case, I think Nellodee had the right of it, already. And toomanycoats gives a good example of its outcome. Chess is a niche hobby that takes a lot of time to get really good at. So in so far as it requires natural talent as well - which it does - the overlap of boys who have talent and the interest and girls how have the talent and the interest, is going to be significantly smaller in the latter case. But this is still different to athletics. No woman is as strong as a competitively strong man. At least, not that I know of. It's a question of actual limits. There isn't equality of ability. But in highly intellectual pursuits, there's equality of ability, just not equality of numbers. I personally am not a fan of sexual separation in hobbies that don't require it. Like chess. It doesn't matter to me if there are fewer women in the hobby so long as it's not a result of women being prevented from pursuing it.

Ultimately though, it should really be the choice of the people who play it. If there are enough women to do so and they want to create a women's league, they have the right to do so and there's nothing wrong with that. I think there would be something wrong with it if that meant that other tournaments were only for men but that's not the case. You have women's leagues and mixed leagues. Gary Kasparov may not have believed that women could be chess champions but he never tried to stop them from competing. So I think it's fine. Women have both a women's league which can encourage women in the hobby and full access to the mixed league to compete against other humans in general. Best of both worlds.

Barring the odd big-footed kenyan. ;)

The one with fair reasons gets shouty (or gets friends to be shouty) when he is disqualified from potential prize money and the one with unacceptable reasons slinks away for being caught.

Easy peasy. Womanhood is for whoever exhibits high levels of entitlement to the part of womanhood they are after. Or is that Womanhood is for the one who exhibits the most alpha male behaviour when disqualified from female activity? Something along those lines anyway.

Women tend to cluster more towards the average, man are spread out more in both directions. Or to put it another way, in any given population large enough for the trend to show, there will be more very smart boys than very smart girls, but also more very stupid boys than very stupid girls. The mean of both groups will be almost the same however.

Yes you see this in send schools. (I've name changed but a frequent flyer here!)

I've taught in send for nearly 2 decades and always far more boys than girls. I think that's why autism was initially seen as a male condition as on average more boys have autism and learning difficulties.

Also it's well researched that stereotyped toys for girls don't encourage spatial manipulation and problem solving. To the point where it's evidenced in maths scores. Whereas boys' do.

I've reluctantly come round to Lego friends (targeted at / buys into the stereotypical girl market) as I applied to test a kit and it was REALLY bloody hard to make!

Not keen on the 'stupid' mind

Great post @OldGardinia

Gender stereotypes mean girls aren't taught / encouraged to play chess.
My story from 30 years ago:
my top girls boarding school didn't have a chess club / team
my DB's boys boarding school did
my all female Cambridge college struggled to find 5 players to make up a college team, other colleges fielded multiple teams, very very rarely did they include female players.

So to me, chess is a game where you need a separate female competition to encourage participation.

(Similarly by the way my college darts team rarely played other teams with females. We had a separate female university team, again to encourage participation.)

I have looked into the research about the "greater male variability hypothesis" in various test-taking, the idea that there are more male than female test-takers in both tails of the distributions, and I have a couple of extra points which are worth thinking about when interpreting those test findings:

1. Who takes the tests in terms of asking if the samples are randomly drawn from the underlying populations?
2. Which sex uses guessing more in test-taking?
3. What is happening to the extreme tail differences over time?

On the first point:

The people taking IQ tests or scholastic tests are usually not randomly drawn samples from the underlying populations. Different countries, for instance, test populations for IQ for different reasons (some to find those who need special education, as the IQ test was developed for that very reason, not as a measure of general intelligence). And scholastic test-taking is based on students choosing to take the test.

In the US, for instance, there are many more girls taking the tests for university admission than there are boys. This affects both the average score and the distribution of the score.

It's not impossible that the larger female sample contains a higher percentage of girls who are going to score lower than the smaller male sample, if the 'extra girls' are created by more girls than boys not doing as well at school deciding to take the test as job opportunities for women without university education are not as good as job opportunities for men without university education.

I would like to see studies based on random sampling in this field so that we could control for the sample size and self-selection problems.

On the second point: Guessing in true-false and multiple-choice questions can increase the proportion of those who score in extreme ends of the distribution, depending on the way correct and false answers are scored, including not choosing an answer at all. Boys and men are more likely to treat the test as a game and more likely to guess than girls and women who are more likely to not answer a question they are unsure of.

This is unlikely to cause tremendous differences, but it will have some effects, especially in true-false type tests.

On the third point: In the US there are more boys than girls who score in the top one percent for the mathematics SAT test, but over time the difference in that is getting smaller. So whatever the causes of that difference, at least some appear to be changing.

Could be differences in practice, given that boys' traditional games and play tend to strengthen things like three-dimensional mental rotation while girls' traditional games and play tend to strengthen linguistic talents etc.

Interestingly enough, in the verbal/linguistic SAT tests (and essay writing tests) the extreme upper one percentage contains more girls than boys.

There are other wider questions that can't be fully answered, such as how tests are created and calibrated (the weights different types of questions are assigned, for instance, the lack of memory effects in the testing, the absence of several kinds of intelligence which can't be easily tested in short amounts of time (creativity, social intelligence), the focus on speed of answers over thoroughness, say), and to what extent we are measuring the same things at both extremes in some distributions (if the lower end, say, includes effects caused by medical conditions).

This is not to dispute the findings themselves, but just to set them into a wider framework and to argue that the questions don't have their final answers yet.

I can't figure out what makes this man a cheating man and Will Thomas not.