Sam Sloan Was Right...and it's the end of the world as we know it...

Ohmygoddess.  I remember reading umpteen years ago an April 1st article by Sam Sloan about a chess game between a young, attractive young lady in a sleeveless, scooped neck blouse (think: tank top) and an older grumpy butt dude who complained, after he lost the game, that the young lady in question had distracted him with her overly-sexy dress.  Mind you, as far as I could tell, she only played chess and ignored the older grumpty butt dude during the entire course of the game.  She did not smile; she did not flirt; she probably did not even blink. Her focus was on the game only --

Could such a thing possible be true, I - chess novice then (and now) - asked myself?  Over the years, there seemed to be scant evidence to support this premise in written accounts of chess events and, believe me, I scoured them for any hint of such evidence.  I found nothing, other than Mankova's mink-draped photographs in a Russian magazine (read article below) and some drooling commentary thereon to suggest that chess dudes even noticed the actual gender of their opponent  -- but then, there was a fist fight between two grandmasters at a certain Chess Olympiad over certain lovely female chessplayer who shall remain nameless.  An outlyer?  Perhaps.

In any event, scientific research continues apace and - ah ha!, it appears that Mr. Sloan was correct in the premise underlying his April Fool's Day article which was (I think) that attractive female chessplayers can be a distraction to male chessplayers. 

Honestly, I'm not making this stuff up.  It was reported tonight in no less an authoritative source than Duncan Loeb McClain's chess blog (yes, I do mean that tongue in cheek) at the venerable New York Times.  Read for yourself:

January 12, 2011, 4:43 pm
To Play Better Against Attractive Women, Men Need to Avert Their Eyes
By DYLAN LOEB MCCLAIN

Do men get distracted by and play differently against attractive women than against other opponents? Yes, according to a study by Swedish researchers.

Called “Beauty Queens and Battling Knights: Risk Taking and Attractiveness in Chess,” the study used a large data set of results from international chess tournaments and cross-referenced them with photographs of 626 of the players — almost half of them women — whose attractiveness was rated by at least 50 independent observers.

The study concluded, “Our results suggest that male chess players choose significantly riskier strategies when playing against an attractive female opponent, even though this does not improve their performance. Women’s strategies are not affected by the attractiveness of the opponent.”

Rest of article. 

Ahhhhh, romance, romance.  All those medieval accounts of romantic chessgames and murders by stone boards smashed over the head of an opponent must be true...

From Goddesschess:

On the topic of gender stereotypes in chess, see generally Gender and Chess
The Tussle in Turin

More Chess Femme News

From NPR:
A Gender Divide In The Ultimate Sport Of The Mind

by Sean Phillips
August 15, 2010
For our male readers, this article contains a smoking hot picture of Jen Shahade
Krush earned $16,000 in this year's U.S. Women's Championship. That may be less than half the prize collected by the male winner of the overall championship, but it's enough that she can devote her time to chess and be a role model for a new generation of girls.

From Blogher.com
Where Are the Female Chess Players?.
August 17, 2010 10:31 am by Melissa Ford in News & Politics
Wow - I actually subscribed to this tonight just so I could write a comment - I mean, darlings, I NEVER do that!  But I thought this was well worth responding to - please read.

Another Study Confirms - Social Roles Constrain Women Chessplayers

Shelby Lyman's column is a regular feature at the Columbus Dispatch:

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.

***************************************************************************

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

Article Perpetuates Myth About Women Chessplayers

I just came across this Chessbase article that perpetuates the myth that difference in relative skill levels in playing chess between females and males is due to females having smaller brains and also that their brains are differently-organized so that the "skills" needed to play chess are lacking. BALONEY! (That is a polite way of saying BULLSHIT!) The truth is this: women have been culturally brain-washed into thinking that they are inferior to males when it comes to playing chess. A controlled blind study using the internet and gender-neutral names for players has demonstrated that there is no difference in results of female and male players with similar ratings when playing against others - as long as the female players did not know the sex of their opponent. Check it out. Chess-playing ability has nothing to do with so-called "spatial ability" or relative brain size (females have smaller brains only because they are generally physically smaller than males, and relative brain size has nothing to do with intelligence or other cognitive abilities). Duh - this is exactly the same kind of argument that was used in the 19th century by white males to legitimize the enslavement of black Africans. That argument was bogus then and the argument about females being inferior chessplayers now is equally bogus, it's just a different form of enslavement. A study that would be mildly interesting in a purely academic sense is why male chessplayers are so anal when it comes to female chessplayers. But the younger generation of chess femmes who are working their way up the ELO ranks today would probably just laugh if approached about such a topic.

New Study on Gender and Chess

Most interesting! Thanks to Allen Becker of Southwest Chess Club for giving me a heads-up on this article this afternoon. 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.

The Never-Ending Question...

(Image: Famous medieval chessplayer Paolo Boi and "Satan" as a seducing woman) Since the first days of Goddesschess, I've been fascinated by the eternal debate, variously phrased (usually in negative terms toward females): "Why can't women play chess as well as men?" Over time, we gathered together various articles and writings from the internet and called it "The Ever-Changing, Never-Ending Question" under Chess and Gender. Famous male chessplayers Fischer and Kasparov, among others, disparaged the chessplaying skills of females. (Both later modified their views on female chessplayers, allowing that at least some females could play as well as a man. They totally ignored the intriguing question of why all men -- as superior players -- didn't play equally well.) Chessbase has now weighed in on the subject in an article by newly-weds WGM Natalia Pogonina and Peter Zhdanov: Women and men in chess – smashing the stereotypes. It's light-hearted, but not light-weight. In particular, the couple have zeroed in on the very thing that could change the entire tenor of this never-ending discussion: how the question is framed. Personally, I think they're on to something significant by recognizing that more women than men do not play chess because women are, in general, more mature and intelligent than men. The question could thus be framed as "Why don't more men waste less time playing chess and contribute more to the betterment of society?" Yeah. I like how that sounds. The more serious question underlying this light-hearted discussion is why so many males have such a fear of recognizing females as equals; so much fear, in fact, that it has been institutionalized in patriarchal religious "laws" that give tremendous power to females as "temptresses" and "sinners" who lead poor, weak-minded, weak-spirited males astray along the path to Perdition. Geez, guys!

How You Ask the Question May Determine the Answer

Hola darlings! It's Saturday evening and I've been working on an article about the Nishapur chess pieces most of the day - time to take a break!

When I first read this article in Newsweek Magazine in 1999, I was so struck by it that I saved it. The principles it teaches continue to speak to me today: (1) The socialization associated with being a male or female colors our assumptions; (2) those underlying assumptions color our perceptions; (3) those perceptions govern how we interact with others and function in larger society.

The thing is, assumptions can be changed - and once these are changed, our perceptions change too. These principles are key to re-defining the perceptions that males and females have about each other and how we interact with each other - and also key to how females can release themselves from the "trap" of inferior expectations when it comes to chess (and every other area of life).

Newsweek June 28, 1999
From Both Sides Now
Women do research the same way men do, but the questions they ask nature may be different. Has feminism changed science?
Author: Sharon Begley With Thomas Hayden Edition:
ATLANTIC EDITION
Section: SocietyPage: 64

One story from the annals of science seems destined to become a minor classic among certain biologists, and it is no coincidence that it concerns sex. Out on the Western plains, biologists were studying herds of mustangs, in which the reigning stallion was believed to have the sole right to procreate. Then a researcher got the bright idea of running DNA tests on the horses. As paternity tests often do, these proved embarrassing: fewer than one third of the herd's foals had been sired by the resident stallions. Instead, mares had snuck over to other herds, mating with males there. Blinded by the "harem" metaphor of mustang social structure, researchers had not even looked for such female behavior.

As such examples accumulate, more and more scholars are wondering whether cultural forces such as feminism affect the direction and results of research. In her new book, "Has Feminism Changed Science?" Penn State historian Londa Schiebinger answers with a definite yes.

"Science is not value-neutral," she argues. "Getting the right answers--turning the crank--may be gender-free. But it is often in setting priorities about what will and what will not be known that gender has an impact."

The claim is inflaming the "science wars," with their battles over whether science is as isolated and objective as partisans claim.

That's the key: it is not that men and women do science differently, but that they choose different questions to pursue, says biologist Patricia Adair Gowaty of the University of Georgia. "The women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s had a huge effect on me," she recalls. "Ideas I was exposed to I have since erected as testable, scientific hypotheses."

One hypothesis involves asking under what circumstances female bluebirds have... well, extramarital affairs. "This is how feminism has changed science," says Gowaty. "I'm not doing the science any differently, but I'm asking a question that has not been asked before."

Gowaty suspects that a female bluebird risks "extra-pair copulations" if she is healthy and a good forager, which would allow her to support her offspring even if her cuckolded mate left. "By answering this question," says Gowaty, "we'll know more about female biology."

And maybe not only the avian kind. Although most scientists dismiss the idea that there is a female "way of knowing"--holistic, nondominating and cooperative--many recognize that the different experiences men and women bring to the lab lead them to scrutinize different aspects of nature.

Marine biologist Mary Beth Saffo of the University of Arizona was startled when she looked around a 1989 conference on symbiosis--often beneficial relationships between living things, like the little fish that clean parasites off sharks in return for table scraps. "The majority were women," she says. Was it a coincidence? In the '50s and '60s, says Saffo, biologists tried to understand ecosystems "through a framework of antagonism and competition." "There's more interest in and recognition of mutualism now," or cooperative relationships between species.

Although Saffo doesn't go so far as to attribute the shift to feminism, it did coincide with the flood of women into ecology. Something similar happened in the study of humans' primate relatives. From the 1950s to the 1970s primatologists studied savanna baboons. This species is more aggressive, male-dominated and competitive than any other nonhuman primate. "Most of these scientists were men," says primatologist Linda Fedigan of the University of Alberta. The species they chose, she says, reinforced the notion that male dominance and aggression are the norms of primate behavior, including ours, and that it is the males who bring social cohesion to the troop.

When feminism and women entered the field, in the 1970s, they upended the stereotype of the passive, dependent female, and questioned the idea that male aggression and alliances are the most powerful shapers of primate society. Instead, it turns out that elderly female baboons determine where the troop will forage each day, and a male's reproductive success depends less on his place in the dominance hierarchy than it does on his relationships with the troop's females. And when women began studying primates other than baboons, they found that females actively pursue males and have loads of extramarital affairs--apparently to get more males to provide and care for the babies. Now females are no longer considered peripheral to primate evolution.

Feminism has also changed ideas about how humans evolved from quadrupedal apes to toolmakers, thinkers and talkers. In the 1960s the answer was unquestioned: hunting. The story was that men who learned to cooperate, communicate and make weapons in order to hunt stimulated their brains and drove evolution. Women tagged along and pushed out babies every few years. But female anthropologists now have other ideas. In "Lucy's Legacy," to be published in November, Alison Jolly of Princeton University argues that behavior where females excel (language and forming social bonds) or roles that fall to females (forging links between generations) played the key role in human evolution.

But would these insights have come even if feminism never existed? "Because the changes came so quickly after the feminist critique, they must be at least a bit in response," says Linda Fedigan. But have feminists exaggerated their effect? Schiebinger and others claim that it took feminists to overthrow the dogma about active, heroic sperm pursuing the fat, passive egg, and substituting the now standard view that the egg plays an active role in conception by sending out fingerlike microvilli to reel in a sperm.

Biologist Paul Gross isn't buying it. "The argument about feminism focusing attention upon the egg is absurd and dishonest," he says, because the egg's active role was noted in textbooks even in the 1960s. "If that's all 'feminist science' can claim as an achievement, then it's a joke."

But it does make other claims, in fields from mustang matings to human evolution. If it turns out that the questions science poses, and the answers it seeks, are not walled off from society, maybe that's as it should be. Remember - the assumptions underlying the question are just as important as the question itself.