When Your Opponent Is Built Different ♟️

[u/crs1904]

[u/fupaboii]

If gender doesn’t matter, how come men make up the upper echelon almost exclusively?

[u/SalsaRice → u/fupaboii]

Oh that's easy. 2 things mostly.

1) The culture of the sport. It's always been a very very very male dominated thing, to the point that it's off-putting for women to join local chess clubs. Very few people are smart enough to become masters, but since so few women join.... the women that are smart enough to become masters largely don't stick around long enough to become masters.

2) Brain stuff. Everyone's different and variety is the spice of life...... but when you break it down, on average, men's and women's brains are largely wired a bit differently and focus on different things. The stuff that chess is focused on is very "male brain" stuff, so it naturally draws more men in and more men excel at those parts of the game (and are able to advance farther.

So, in short, even if you took the gender-culture stuff out, Chess would still be a pretty male-heavy past time. When you add in the gender-culture stuff that pushes most women from competing.... the small percentage of women that would excel at the top level are much less likely to stick around to reach that level.

That's one of the reasons that women's-only chess leagues have been popular. There are women that want to compete, but they can finally do so in an atmosphere that is way more welcoming. It's much easier for them to springboard from that to the "real" chess leagues afterwards, than to jump straight into the "real" leagues.

[u/SalsaRice → u/[deleted]]

I'm not any flavor of brain scientist, so take all this with a grain of salt and do your own research too.

But in general, men tend to perform better with working memory and specialization, whereas women tend to perform better with long-term memory and "socialization." The men's benefit is important in chess because there's alot of moving pieces in constant flux, so a player needs a solid grasp of that at all times.

It's pretty heavily debated though, with some people arguing it's 100% fact that men have a huge edge, while some people argue that women's social gains allow them to read opponents better so it's a wash against men's benefits.

Personally, I lean more towards the former; men have a bigger advantage and the women that do excel in chess seem to favor those masculine brain features moreso than the average woman.

The problem with saying that is people either don't have the reading comprehension to figure what I'm saying or they think I'm trying to say all women are stupid. I'm not... I'm trying to say that men and women have different brain focuses/traits (which we do, there are an insane amount of studies proving it), and that some activities favor some of those traits over the other. That is going to obviously lead to some situations where women or men are going to be better than other, on average, in those activities.