ON CHESS
Women are moving aggressively, too
Saturday, January 30, 2010 2:55 AM
By SHELBY LYMAN
A 69-country study of 500,000 boys and girls ages 14 to 16 found insignificant gender differences in math performance, Scientific American magazine recently reported.
The survey concluded that differences resulted from social rather than innate factors.
Considering the parallel between math and chess abilities, the findings are a clarion call to action for the chess community.
In recent decades, women have played top-flight chess with increasing success, belying the preconceptions of many skeptics. As with mathematics, little in their play suggests innate gender differences. Women play as aggressively as their male counterparts.
The games of Judit Polgar, ranked among the world's top 10 players for years, offer strong evidence. Her vigorous, creative attacking style terrorizes male and female opponents alike.
Shelby Lyman is a Basic Chess Features columnist.
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Many studies have been undertaken over the years to explore the reasons why women are not as good at chess as men. Some have argued that it is due to difference in male and female brain functions, that the differences are innate and generally cannot be overcome no matter how much training a female might receive. Others have argued that this is baloney, and the differences are due to social and cultural forces that act upon females rather than any inherent physical and genetic differences between the sexes.It certainly is true that there are inherent physical and genetic differences between the sexes, and viva la difference'! But I also think it's baloney that women are inherently inferior chessplayers due to these differences. More recent studies have demonstrated that gender roles (i.e., social and cultural forces operating on females - those "tapes" we play in our internal dialog) are most responsible for what is perceived to be females' 'inferiority' in chessplaying. But it seems those old stories are true. Often it is just a matter of a female player letting the male player win :)
European Journal of Social Psychology
Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 38, 231–245 (2008)
Published online 14 May 2007 in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.440
Checkmate? The role of gender stereotypes in the ultimate
intellectual sport
ANNE MAASS*, CLAUDIO D’ETTOLE
AND MARA CADINU
University of Padova, Italy
Abstract
Women are surprisingly underrepresented in the chess world, representing less that 5% of registered tournament players worldwide and only 1% of the world’s grand masters. In this paper it is argued that gender stereotypes are mainly responsible for the underperformance of women in chess. Forty-two male–female pairs, matched for ability, played two chess games via Internet. When players were unaware of the sex of opponent (control condition), females played approximately as well as males.
When the gender stereotype was activated (experimental condition), women showed a drastic performance drop, but only when they were aware that they were playing against a male opponent.
When they (falsely) believed to be playing against a woman, they performed as well as their male opponents. In addition, our findings suggest that women show lower chess-specific self-esteem and a weaker promotion focus, which are predictive of poorer chess performance. Copyright # 2007 John
Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Chess is not only one of the oldest games but it is also, by many, considered the ultimate intellectual sport. Although chess is an intellectual pursuit not requiring physical strength, women are generally
considered inferior and they represent less than 5% of registered tournament players worldwide.
Currently, the best female player, Judit Polgar, is placed in position 17 of the FIDE ranking (Federation Internationale des Echecs, 2006) and she is also the only woman among the top 100 players of the world. Thus, women seem to be underrepresented as well as underperforming.1
Why should this be the case? A first step to understand gender differences in chess is to ask what characteristics are predictive of success and whether these characteristics are less common in females.
We will only consider general cognitive and motivational factors here and ignore the specific tactical and strategic skills that develop as a function of chess training, including the striking ability of expert chess players to quickly capture the gist of highly complex chess positions (de Groot & Gobet, 1996; Ross, 2006).
European Journal of Social Psychology
Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 38, 231–245 (2008)
Published online 14 May 2007 in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.440
*Correspondence to: Dr Anne Maass, DPSS, Universito` di Padova, Via Venezia, 8, 35139 Padova, Italy.
E-mail: anne.maass@unipd.it
1However, Charness and Gerchak (1996) have argued that women’s underrepresentation among top ranks is simply a function of relative participation rates, since extreme scores tend to increase disproportionally as population size increases.
Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Received 11 November 2006
Accepted 2 April 2007
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