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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

why is chess separated by gender?

we don't separate by gender other intellectual pursuits, e.g. best author, best director, jeopardy winner, etc.

[edit] Just checked Wikipedia, and it turns out Chess mostly isn't separate by gender so I stand corrected:

The majority of chess tournaments are open to all participants regardless of gender. Very few, if any, international tournaments are restricted to men, but a few are restricted to women, most prominently the Women's World Chess Championship and the Women's Chess Olympiad.

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when something is dominated massively by one gender, it becomes unwelcoming to the other.

Women's chess tournaments are to encourage more women to get into chess.

It is not separated by gender. Anyone can compete in the main tournaments. There is then a separate one for women.

We separate pursuits with a vast gender-related discrepancy. And 99 of the top 100 chess players are men.

Some people believe that men and women are statistically identical if not physically then at least mentally. But just because you can see something, doesn't mean it doesn't exist

I find it rather puzzling why people seggregate genders even though the idea is to make society more equal? Wouldn't it be much more beneficial for women and men to share the same room so to say.

men and women are not equal

Only when it comes to some biological factors. Most of what we believe separates men from women is learned behavior.

That still counts in practice. We can't immediately rewind time and redo things, even if we wanted to.

> Most of what we believe separates men from women is learned behavior.

I haven't seen convincing evidence to support this.

There's the possibility that the differences we see in the higher echelons of chess arise from biological differences between men and women. But that possibility is not being explored for political/social reasons.

Ultimately we are all products of evolution. While some aspects of our nature are instinctive (no external sensorial input is needed to exhibit certain hebaviour), others we learn from observing the surrounding (external sensorial input). If you say all behavior is ultimatelly biological, well, of course you are right, but you are not considering what could have been observed learned behavior on the way.

The point of segregating physical sports is to give women (people who went through female puberty) a fighting chance.

There’s a famous experiment by the Williams sisters, two of the best female tennis players ever, who got demolished by a guy ranked 203rd in the world. There is no way for a woman to make up the testosterone difference in sports where physical prowess matters.

https://www.sportskeeda.com/tennis/news-the-williams-sisters...

No that doesn’t mean every man is fitter than every woman. It matters in top ranks of a sport.

But chess is not a sport. Think about it, how many calories do I burn sitting in a chair and moving my hands occasionally?!

And no, the brain consumes mostly sugars.

Interestingly, grandmasters burn ridiculous energy during tournaments.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/22/chess-grandmasters-lose-weig...

Hm, interesting. But doing sports do all kind of things to muscles. And physiology wise men have more muscles. But intelligence is the same for men and women.

EDIT: They don't cite any papers though

In the context of a discussion about chess, they are.

In the context of a discussion about how chess players (and people in general) are treated, however, they are not.

It would be, but that isn't this particular discussion, this is about chess. And so for all intents and purposes men and women are equal.

This discussion is about tournaments, which are about a lot more than what happens over the board.

In Sweden, a mere 3% of adult chess club players are women. Women and men then evidently feel quite differently about playing chess (I don't have an explanation.)

Although gender is a political correctness nuclear landmine, imagine if chess had aptitude diversity rules. "No, you can't castle if your Elo is 800+."

My impression is contract bridge has somewhat gender parity in terms of who plays it. [0] The ranking of contract bridge players doesn't appear to measure current quantitative strength, which seems to encourage volume of play rather than skill.

0. https://www.acbl.org/tournament/

> The title of Grandmaster, along with the lesser FIDE titles of International Master (IM), FIDE Master (FM), and Candidate Master (CM), is open to all players regardless of gender. The great majority of grandmasters are men, but 40 women have been awarded the GM title as of 2022, out of a total of about 2000 grandmasters. Since about the year 2000, most of the top 10 women have held the GM title. There is also a Woman Grandmaster title with lower requirements awarded only to women.

Seems like yes.. but also no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmaster_(chess)

Is there any evidence to think that? Are there games similar to chess that are dominated by women at the top levels? Is there some reason to think that chess-ability genes are evenly distributed by gender?

My own intuition is that, just like there are more men above 130 IQ and below 70, there are probably more great male chess players than female. This is just the idea of greater male variability which is found across a number of different measures - everything from variation in height to things like polydactyly being more common in men.

I've played chess since I was young, have taught many people to play chess, have played in company tournaments, play whoever I can when I travel, and there's just no question that the vast, overwhelming majority of women don't enjoy playing chess.

I can't even speak to a possible difference in gender capability because I've never known a single woman who enjoyed it enough to do anything more than learn how the pieces move.

There is no central planning.

You can go create a chess tournament for short people, or vegetarians, or people who have lived in at least three countries, and nobody will stop you. Nor will your decision be contrary to “the idea” of a more equal society.

Vegetarian chess championships:

https://www.facebook.com/people/Vegetarian-Chess-Championshi...

Not that they don't exist, but I couldn't find the others.

Men and women are generally different in physiology, psychology, and many other measurable ways. I don't see why it should be puzzling that there are specific spaces or areas in society that accommodate more of one than the other. This has been demonstrated numerous[0] times[1] by[2] studies[3] (and there are plenty that go both ways, I'll readily admit, but the measurements favor sex-segregated education for certain ages of school children, for example).

It is only people pushing something about "equality" that rejects that men and women are different that take issue with this idea.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-sex_education#cite_note... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-sex_education#cite_note... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-sex_education#cite_note... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-sex_education#cite_note...

I guess an open question is if there are two categories of women and everyone, does it imply that the female category is less competitive? And, if so, is that a bad thing? And, finally, if fewer men played chess competitively and the shoe was entirely on the other foot, would male-only tournaments then be acceptable?

> why is chess separated by gender?

Like most other sports, the "male" league is actually open to everyone, women just aren't competitive.

Racing for example. F1 is open to women, and yet women have their own racing league

The Polgár sisters enter the chat

Still not competitive at the top level.

Even being behaviorism real-life experiments.

World rank number 8 is not competitive? Lol.

A single experiment getting to 8th ranked player is a major win for his theory. Tens of thousands of players try to get there and fail.

https://www.chess.com/article/view/best-chess-players-of-all...

Anyway, I really don't care about chess, so make of it whatever you want.

> A single experiment getting to 8th ranked player is a major win for his theory

That's not how it works.

Don't give me this of all time nonsense. Rank 8 at any time is a major accomplishment. You have no idea about chess if you think it's not a huge accomplishment. And yes that's how it works, think Bayesian instead of yes/no.

It is, and it is not. There are tournaments specifically for women, but there are also loads of tournaments that are "open" and it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman. For example: The World Chess Open

Just checked Wikipedia as well, and it sounds like Chess mostly isn't separate by gender so I stand corrected:

Because they complained that it’s unfair when both gender compete.

And we do absolutely have special prizes by gender for other intellectual professions like actors, female leaders/entrepreneurs, female writers, female alpinist (“first female to climb X or Y”). As if it’s something unreachable.

Stereotype Threat

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