It will never happen - bonkers women’s chess story

[NotBadConsidering]

You have to laugh:

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

Not really relevant, but just realised my 30 years ago was in fact 40 years ago!

@nepeta That is a superb post. Enjoyed reading it and gave me things to think about. Regards point number one, your list of ways in which the studies could be flawed is all very plausible. Obviously we'd need to start referring to specific studies to examine if they were so but as a simple highlighting that more judgement should be reserved it's an effective point.

With regards number two, that's certainly not at odds with my life experiences or probably anybody else's here. The suggestion that males' greater propensity for risk-taking or casualness to failure (however you so choose to describe it) could manifest as a greater distribution is interesting. It would depend on the test distinguishing between failure to answer and answering incorrectly. And one would suppose (I haven't reasoned this through fully) that unless the multiple choice was between only a right and wrong choice, that the more questions in the test the greater that people guessing would lead to negative outcomes. I.e. if someone guesses on a multiple choice question with two, four or six options then the guesser is going to look increasingly ignorant (rather than"stupid", @toomanycoats ;) ) But all that said, from a meta point of view point two is interesting because the context of the discussion was whether there are differences between male and female brains and in so far as point two casts doubt on the distribution hypothesis it does so by introducing another difference.

I again, want to reiterate that this whole discussion is academic in terms of the trans debate because I've never seen anything that supports the idea of transpeople having an "opposite brain" in the first place however people attempt to distinguish between them.

For point three, I can only say that is a very good question. And as with the first point it's a case of going back to studies and looking in more detail. You've certainly made me feel I need to look at specific studies again if I'm going to quote conclusions. But then one aspect of intelligence is the ability to abstract. If we're to functional sometimes we have to remember the conclusions and not the reasoning. For now I'll simply have to flag this conclusion as "may need reevaluation" should I be inclined to trot it out again. I have to thank you for an interesting post.

I've split this into a second post because it's really the more important part. I hope that's okay and not against any rules on double-posting. There's a good reason for it.

So... given that my suggestion was that there may be differences in numbers but not in boundaries, and @nepeta made a good post about how what is the practical outcome of all this, though? I feel with chess it doesn't matter that much because as stated earlier, you have women's leagues and mixed leagues. So there's support for women in chess. How important is the actual number of women like chess? There's a strong sexual discrepancy in people who play Dungeons and Dragons, too. Must we campaign for more women to kill orcs and loot treasure whilst eating pizza? (Don't answer that!) In any population in which two groups have an affinity for associating with each other there is going to be a resultant divergence in areas of association. To suppose that there's a tendency for women to want to congregate with other women and men to do likewise (I emphasize tendency) yet expect areas of interest to break down in identical proportion to the size of the groups is like flipping a coin and expecting it to land on its edge. To put it more clearly: Over time, a mild tendency to prefer your own some of the time is going to mean divergence of interests. And the divergence will accelerate over time. Until it reaches critical point and a young girl realizes she's the only one left at chess club and wants to hang out with other girls who are doing something else. It's mathematically inevitable in some areas unless you somehow got things just right and that coin landed on its edge.

Of course, there are other factors, attractors that overcome the divergence because it's just so appealing that it outweighs the preference for ones own - which is only a soft preference in most situations. (And a hard preference in others like a girl's night out or a stag do).

So we should mix things up a every now and again to ensure that girls who want to play chess don't feel like they're literally the only one. A woman's chess league is a good way to do that. And the same applies in the other direction with other things. Don't let society get so calcified that it becomes really difficult for someone to pursue a hobby they enjoy because they were born a different sex to the majority. But don't become dogmatic in every area that if something isn't 50/50, or even 80/20, that it's a sign something must be corrected. Because that's an expected outcome unless you erase all barriers between sexes and try to "educate" out of people their natural degree of group seeking completely.

I see that in the engineering world, which is where this cool and interesting debate @nepeta and I were just engaging in suddenly takes on real world consequences and becomes a source of friction. There's a friction between those who think outcome is solely due to prejudice and systemic obstacles, and those that think it's just an outcome of choice potentially derived from underlying tendencies. I suspect there are inherent differences in tendency between the sexes which leads to differences in outcome. I think those modest tendencies are then much compounded by the cultural factors just discussed. Where one leaves off and another starts, I couldn't say. But the model for how things are in the chess world I think is good. Try to encourage people to pursue what they're interested in but don't become dogmatic about it. And similarly, if you do want to look at proportions of women in something, a bloke in female dress still doesn't count as a woman.

I've veered into dangerous waters at the end there, but the pink brain / blue brain debate is a problem that exists outside of just the trans issue. Despite my statements about different distributions, I think the pink brain / blue brain idea is largely an enticing myth.

Sorry for the epic post length. :)

So many depressing studies demonstrating how girls as young as six internalise societal messages about their academic limitations especially maths.

But in any event, I did find this story odd in that the BBC straightforwardly reports a ‘man’ discovered in a ‘women’s’ competition. Isn’t that a bit presumptuous of them? In Canada, he wouldn’t have to wear a burka. Could’ve rocked up in regular clothes and a beard and still been allowed to enter.

There are studies that show that the male statistical bell curves have larger tails at both ends than the female bell curves. While this might mean a male at the extreme could possibly be more intelligent than a female, it also means at the same time by the same mechanism that a male could be stupider in the extreme. It doesn't mean male or female is better, only that male has a further reaching bell curve than female. The two sexes are overall at the same median.
Chess has societal input and bias, e.g. Russia. I would love for chess to be a non sex based sport if for no other reason for males not to be winning women's events. Let each stand on thier merit.

I suppose the technical difference is that one is working within the rules, and the other not.

But don't become dogmatic in every area that if something isn't 50/50, or even 80/20, that it's a sign something must be corrected.

I tend to agree, but the idea that a disparity is always caused by structural discrimination is one of the foundational ideas in modern identity politics. To the point that in these kinds of arguments it's considered that showing a disparity is the end of the argument over whether there is some kind of discriminatory process going on.

The assumption is that if there was no structural discrimination every job sector, every pass-time, etc, would have an demographic representation that mirrored that of the society as a whole.

Thanks for your nice words, Gardinia. It is an interesting and complicated topic for sure, and some recent theories about the way environmental effects might actually turn various genes on or off might ultimately play into all this, too, so it's worth following what will happen within that field.

The question of chess is one I haven't really thought about much. Nobody in my extended family played and it wasn't a cultural thing where I grew up. Come to think of it, I must have been almost an adult before I saw a chess board in real life.

But I do think it was faintly coded as more suitable for geeky boys than for girls, and girls were not really viewed as geeky to begin with (only as teacher's pets or seen as working far too hard even if they hardly lifted a finger). Now I am interested in learning about the game!

I wonder if we overlapped, TeenDivided. Were you at ‘the one with the corridor’?

Very much so! 85-88.

Nepeta, take a look at the technical report produced regarding the gl assessment cat4 tests for U.K. school children. In these, the standard deviations and means are given by age group and sex. The standard deviation is consistently slightly larger for boys. I only know this as my daughter recently did one for late entry after moving to a grammar area, but it’s really interesting if tier a data nerd.

@DemiColon
I tend to agree, but the idea that a disparity is always caused by structural discrimination is one of the foundational ideas in modern identity politics. To the point that in these kinds of arguments it's considered that showing a disparity is the end of the argument over whether there is some kind of discriminatory process going on.

Progressives: People are blank slates and any disparity of outcome is a result of external factors.
Also Progressives: Gender identity is an inherent trait that you "just know".

@nepeta
But I do think it was faintly coded as more suitable for geeky boys than for girls, and girls were not really viewed as geeky to begin with (only as teacher's pets or seen as working far too hard even if they hardly lifted a finger). Now I am interested in learning about the game!

Now I'm reminded of the Least/Most meme format I've seen on KiwiFarms which contrasts two groups as overlapping only at their extremes. So you'd see for example "Most autistic girl" and she's vaguely nerdy and covered in Harry Potter merch next to "Least autistic boy" and he's having a tantrum over some D&D edition. Some people have opined that autistism "shows up less" with girls and this leads to a disparity in diagnoses. I'm not equating chess enthusiasm with being on the spectrum, just saying it's a not unpopular view that girls are inherently better able to 'mask' such traits / people notice traits less.

Jenny Nicholson can produce a 1hr 17min critical analysis of the movie Dear Evan Hanson and still come across as socially fairly normal to boys.

Really brilliant thread, ladies. Thank you.

I have little interest in chess, but loved the discussion.

I recommend the film Queens Gambit, by the way!

Yes, that tends to be the case in educational testing, though the absolute differences in the standard deviations by sex vary depending on the topic being tested and also can change over time.

The technical report I found shows girls scoring slightly higher, on average, than boys on three of the four tests in secondary school, including spatial reasoning (which I found a little surprising).

Boys scored higher, on average, in quantitative reasoning, and that one also had a larger standard deviation difference. Interesting, because any (small) differences in average results also affect how we compare the distributions.

Anyone who really wants to excel at certain intellectual disciplines is going to have to spend a lot of time around particular sorts of weird nerdy men. Who often have rather poor social skills especially when it comes to interacting with the opposite sex. I imagine that alone discourages many would-be participants.

I'll second that this is an interesting discussion. But I think all here can agree that regardless of if there are different trends that doesn't mean a little girl "has a boy brain" or vice versa for liking things that are non-stereotypical for her sex.

Thank you to everyone who has shared their knowledge on the subject of female vs male intelligence; immensely interesting to read these detailed and insightful posts.

Ah, definitely overlapped! Beautiful place. Shame I had boys.

Purely anecdotally, I've seen a fair few CAT4 papers in my time - with the paperbased ones at least, those completed by boys do overwhelmingly have every question answered even if they are guesses, whilst there are blanks left on a significant number of girls' ones. Marking exam papers also showed a lot of questions completely missed out instead of any attempt at all made to even grab 1 or two marks, whereas on the whole, boys would try or even just write nonsense - as a group, they seemed to be happier about potentially being wrong.

I'm not sure whether I was taught or worked out that if I didn't have a scooby what a question was asking or the correct answer, if I marked one randomly, I at least had a 1 in 4 chance (or whatever) of hitting on the right answer compared to a 0 chance if I left it blank in a multiple guess choice paper. And I always had a bash in case I could get a couple of marks for workings or the first part of a multistage question. But I do remember teachers telling us this to put something down for every question even if you didn't know it in later years whilst I was thinking 'well, that's obvious, isn't it?'.

Maybe there's an element of girls feeling that they should only participate if they know they're right (and then deal with the 'maybe I'll be called teacher's pet or a know it all' narrative - it can be worth it if you know you're right, but definitely not if you aren't certain of your answer in the first place)? and if you don't take part, you can't win/lose, compared to an 'Oh, what's the worst that could happen? I'd be wrong? Ach, big deal, I could be right'.

@NeverDropYourMooncup

I think that is the same issue seen in women choosing not to apply for jobs because they don't meet every single criteria on a job spec. Whereas men seem to just apply regardless.