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

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.

As I Said Before - It's a Numbers Game

This isn't news - just further confirmation of earlier studies that I wrote about at Goddesschess some time ago. Women are NOT inferior to men when it comes to playing chess, it's just that the relative sample of women who do play is so much smaller than that for men, the statistics get skewed. Women players distribute across a classic "Bell curve" the same way that male players do, it's just that theirs is a LOT smaller. Chess isn't necessarily about testosterone or spatial perception, or even "superior" intelligence. Women do and can play as well as men, and will achieve equal levels of GMs and IMs with the guys - if we can somehow as a world manage to get to that "critical mass" of female chessplayers where the players that possess the skills required for chess reach equal levels. There is still a long way to go. So, darlings, don't be fooled by the folks who say that women can't play chess, or that women don't play chess as well as men, or whatever blah blah blah about the supposed "inferiority" of women when it comes to playing chess. It's a lot of baloney and fear on the part of the folks spewing forth these misleading statements (at best) or downright lies (at worst) about female chessplayers.