If women are the same as men in chess ability then why women only chess tournaments?
in 2019 Ju Wenjun earned a staggering $347,368 she is rated 2560 , just let that sink in 2560
now just scraping into the top 100 for prize money was Evgeny Shtembuliak rated 2752 and he earned in prize money for 2019 a grand total of , drum roll ..... $560.00
so should men in the top 100 start identifying as women so they can get a massive pay rise ?
sorry to trigger the white knights , I'm thinking a lot of soy milk just got spat out , but really you can't justify this situation .
it's patronising to women to have women only tournaments and it's unfair on men
It is a known fact that sex hormons influence our mood, behavior and decisions. Hormons even influence the brain structure.
www.karger.com/Article/FullText/507083So to argue that all behavioral differences are caused by a systematic oppression of women is inherrently flawed. I am not completely sure if that was the argument of this article, but it goes into that direction.
I think women in average just have less interest in chess, also men are in average more competitive (caused by male sex hormons), so statistically you will get much more men at top level. This is a much better explanation than saying it's because of the systematic oppression of women.
This doesn't mean that men are more intelligent than women and I despise all comments or jokes which suggest that.
I also acknowledge that men often misbehave when they meet women in a male dominated field like chess with stupid comments towards women. Please stop it.
But please open your eyes and see that this "Critical Theory" and "Gender Ideology" is nonsense.
If any possible biological brain differences between men and women were of such fundamental importance to chess ability there wouldn't exist a single female IM, let alone GM. Are you guys aware of how good you have to be at visualization and calculation of variations to become an IM?
As for arguments that men vastly outnumbering women in the top ranks prove anything about inherent male or female abilities, please note that the difference in sample size would lead to such a domination as well. A smaller sample size means lower maximum values and of course it also means a smaller number in general in all rating ranges. These effects are there regardless of any differences in the underlying distributions.
As discussed, there do seem to be differences in rating range ratios. But where they come from is a matter of debate and there are several possible explanations. Besides the ideas of a statistical oddity, naturally inherent differences or social effects due to discrimination there are also other ideas: For example it might be that among the female population of ELO rated chess players there is an increasing interest in chess lately. So if there are relatively more newcomers within the female population of ELO rated chess players, it would stand to reason that this would skew the distribution to lower ratings. I don't know if that is the case, but I think it's quite unscientific to draw from this data any conclusions about differences in brain structure or natural abilities etc.
Also I think the debate has hardly touched upon what could be done to change the bad situations described by the article.
There doesn't seem much I can do about this as an individual player, but I have tried to do a little. Besides playing on Lichess, I have tried a Chinese app called Chess Alliance (Guo Xiang Lian Meng). Disadvantages compared to Lichess: Not free software (basic service is free to play but the extras aren't and the source is closed), app usually needs to be side-loaded, games are stored only on your device, ratings change wildly, no premove, chat severely limited, fewer game options, high server lag outside China (which the software does not adjust for). But you can meet lots of Chinese players on it if you don't mind playing at a lag disadvantage and in their time zone. Unlike Lichess, this app encourages players to set their age and gender on their profile. Most of the players I've seen identify as children, which means the experience they're having now might influence to what extent they stay in the game later. As I don't want the girls to feel outdone by the larger numbers of boys, I adopt the following strategy: whenever I am beaten by a player identifying as a girl, I send her a friend request afterwards. If she accepts, that means (1) she now has an entry on her friends list that reminds her there's this guy she managed to beat, (2) when I'm online she can challenge me if she wants a break from being beaten by more advanced players (as, unlike Lichess, the Chinese app does not allow players to set custom rating limits when finding an opponent, so the only way to say "I'd like to calm down with an easier game now" is to choose a weaker player from your friends list), and (3) if I go online and find she's in a game with someone else, and especially if she's losing, I'll make sure to challenge her afterwards (reminds her there are games she can win). I do not get upset if any friend request or challenge goes ignored (players may have plans I don't know), and I do not attempt to point out their mistakes as I assume they'll use the computer tools for that (and it's not as if I don't make a few myself). Hopefully that helps a little, but I am of course open to reasonable suggestions as to anything I could be doing differently.
#526 Supplemental:
Hou Yifan, Alexander Donchenko and Nijat Abasov have the same std rating (2658) but Hou is worth 15-20 million while Nijat and Alex are only worth 1-5 million.
www.celebsagewiki.com/nijat-abasovnetworthwikinews.com/hou-yifan/www.celebsagewiki.com/alexander-donchenkoWhat a pity Lichess published this propogandist cringing article full of factual errors and pseudoscience.
It is well established now that men's and women's brains differ. That this may not be neurologically observable is irrelevant and simply due to the limits of observation. For example IQ is not 'neurologically observable' but it remains a significant differentiating feature.
As has repeatedly pointed out, there is the uncomfortable truth of what has become known as the "gender paradox" namely that countries that are instigating social and economic policies to bring about gender equality are actually seeing bigger gender differences. Go figure.
As far as I am concerned I couldn't give a rat's arse that women aren't playing chess. So what? There are more male engineers, more male criminals and more female nurses. So what?
It's time to leave these corrosive identity politics at the door. They are propagated by people who love the sound of the word 'equality' but have no true understanding or experience of what that actually means. Let people be people. They are similar in some ways and different in others.
#532 The same could be said of so many other things: politics, science, math, technology, etc. One selfish reason we could take interest (assuming we don't care about female players who in adolescence or later give up on the game altogether; among children there isn't the same gap) in understanding this gap in chess is to provide insights to help us better understand those other differences.
Bywało
This article is too spicy for many commenters, oof. It's such a boy's club and they don't even realize it... Well, the first step is to start talking about it...
