This was actually quite an interesting article. Addresses a few of the common hypotheses and explains why they don’t work. Their conclusion is that it’s the propensity of men to focus obsessively.
Interesting stuff.
As an aside, I remember someone on HN saying something I found very meaningful (which I only remember paraphrased) and which I think I’ve tried to live by since. It went something like:
You know what stopped me from programming? It wasn’t the people who said I couldn’t code. It wasn’t the fact that I had limited access to a computer. It was nothing. Nothing stopped me from doing this.
My impression is that similar "men dominate" dynamics apply to a very wide range of (de facto) competitive human activities - ones where the vast majority of the rewards go to a tiny fraction of the topmost talent. But being mere (say) 98th percentile doesn't get you squat.
Even if all the creeps and jerks in such areas were magically transformed into perfect gentlemen, women are mostly too wise to spend that much of their lives on long-odd gambits.
You are saying that statistically women have more wisdom than men? Wisdom being defined as not devoting quite so much of their lives to a single obsession?
Doesn't sound like a convincing argument to me. What is your evidence for this?
I remember reading about a study looking at why boys who did very well in STEM subjects in high school were more likely to major in those subjects in college than girls who did very well in those subjects in high school.
They looked at how these kids who were at the top of their classes in STEM subjects did in their non-STEM subjects. The boys were much more likely than the girls to have STEM subjects as the only subjects where they were at the top of the class. They were often good in other subjects, but usually only outstanding in STEM.
The girls were more likely than the boys to be at the top in both STEM and non-STEM.
They speculated that this could partly explain why girls who are as good as the top boys in high school STEM subjects are less likely to major in such subjects in college.
Maybe there is something similar except for chess instead of STEM? So girls might obsess as much as boys, but girls who are good at chess might be more likely to also be good at something else and so are less likely to pick chess as what they obsess over.
If you take two normal distributions, and shift one to the left a bit, and shift one to the right a bit, the peaks are not far from each other. But all of the inhabitants of each tail end will be almost exclusively from one group.
So if males are slightly more competitive, obsessive, aggressive, and stronger on average, we end up with the populations of grandmasters, CEOs, professional sports, and prison populations all 90+ percent male.
You don't need to shift them. Just take one distribution and tweak the standard deviation a tiny bit, and now the tail ends will be overwhelmingly dominated by one of the populations.
I don’t think the hyper competitive fixation some men develop is healthy, nor something women should aspire to. Maybe it looks cool to be “the best” at something but if you look into the mental health of olympic athletes you get a very disturbing picture of what is going on here.
People also only see the successes usually. Nobody remembers the guy who tried to become the best, worked himself to the bone and still failed. For every guy that makes it, you have 100s that don't. The future prospects of those that fail do not look great. These competitors worked themselves to the limit for years and have really nothing to show for it.
I think it's more of a numbers thing. Irena Krush and Susan Polgar would destroy most male players. There's so few women in chess compared to the number of men.
“it’s just as possible for a woman to become the best as any guy. But there are so many difficulties and social boundaries for women generally in society. That is what blocks it.”
The complaint kinda gets at the heart of the competition divide. A driven guy would say "that's what motivated me"
The problem with the "sexism is blocking" model is that it can't explain why this would continue to be a problem for chess today, when women have made so many inroads in other areas.
Sure, there's sexism in chess now, but does anyone seriously think 2020's chess players are more sexist than, say, lawyers and law teachers in the 60's and 70's? And yet women were able to steadily break through in law, and medicine, and so many other areas.
I'm guessing most of the reason is like the story in the article where the women dropped out because of all the unwanted male nerd attention, coupled with perhaps less of a predilection towards monomania...
I see there's still an audience for this apologist bullshit. In the
cake of life, the women are literally the eggs and butter, and the men
are the chocolate sprinkles. Yeah we're mostly useless (as the
one-father-many-mothers ratio attests), which is why men evolved for
greater variance. We are in other words the "spice of life."
Because the female brain is different from the male brain. Everything that involves analytical thinking and physical competition is male dominated. Women are biologically incapable of competing with men on the same level in any sports. That's why they have their own leagues.
Women are biologically incapable of competing with men on the same level in any sports.
Not true. Women can, and do, beat mean head-to-head in ultra-running. Now yes, men win more than women on balance, but it's not unheard of for a woman to outright win a challenging ultra-marathon (as opposed to winning the "women's division"). There are probably other exceptions as well.
It looks like you are linking a website that is outright fake or just satire. The first competition listed was won by a cis woman, and lists the woman who placed ninth as should have been first (despite the other two 'below' her finishing second and third retrospectively).
It seems like you are the operator of this website too as you exclusively created your account to post about it.
You're looking at the wrong results sheet. Under "2024 Official GC Results", click on the "Circuit Race Results" link.
The first place spot on that competition was given to Claire Law, who is a male. In second place is Sarah Flamm, an actual woman, who should have been awarded the winning place.
Fact is, a male was allowed to compete in this women's event, and he came in first place. And this is just one example of many, as the other hundreds of entries on https://shewon.org amply demonstrate.
But it turns out to be a very well-written and comprehensive overview; could serve as a single reference on the topic.