Chess is more popular than ever, yet it remains a male-dominated sport. Yet there is no intellectual difference between men and women. So why is there a gender gap? Sporza Daily discovered it.
Chess is booming, but where are the women?
Since 2020, chess has erased the stigma of being a stale, old man’s sport. Thanks to a dream coincidence: due to the lockdown everyone suddenly started playing chess online and at the same time the popular series The Queen’s Gambit, about a chess genius, was on Netflix.
Chess may no longer be an old man’s sport, but it is still a man’s sport. We don’t find a single woman in the top 100 of the FIDE rankings. We find the Chinese Hou Yifan first at 116, but in reality she has already stopped.
What explains this underrepresentation of women? Sporza Daily went to investigate.
Less than 15% of all chess players are women.
Barber Wiebke
The Myth: “Women Are Not Smart Enough”
It’s a persistent myth, debunked several times by scientists, but the female brain is actually the same as the male brain.
Hungarian Laszlo Polgar demonstrated this in the 1980s and 1990s with an experiment conducted on his own daughters. His statement was: geniuses are not born, they are made.
The Polgar sisters.
Underrepresented
One of the main reasons there are no women in the top 100 is that there are simply far fewer women playing chess.
“Less than 15% of all players worldwide are women,” says Wiebke Barbier, representative of female chess players at the Belgian Chess Federation.
“From a statistical point of view, it is therefore not illogical that there is not a single woman in the top 100. In Belgium, out of approximately 6,000 chess players, 460 are women. This is just under 8%. She is not a anomalous figure, but it is. It doesn’t make us happy either.”
“I received a small budget from the Belgian association to promote chess among women. For example, I had our best players take lessons with the best coaches and organized the First Ladies Open of Belgium, a small tournament especially for women .”
Many girls drop out of school because they develop other interests.
Anna-Maja Kazarian
The role of women
Another sore point that may explain the imbalance in chess is the historical inequality between men and women. After all, for a long time, different things were expected of women than men.
Bobby Fischer – who has often expressed questionable opinions – once said plainly that women “are terrible chess players.” “They would be better off staying at home and waiting for their husbands to return.”
More than 50 years later, fortunately the gender gap has narrowed significantly, although not in all countries.
“Many girls drop out sooner or later because they have other interests,” Dutch chess player and YouTuber Anna-Maja Kazarian says from personal experience.
Kazarian, like Barbier in Belgium, is trying to attract more women to the sport she loves. “With the Chess Queens we want to promote chess for and among women. We try to interest girls in this sport, but also to retain them.”
Contains content inserted by a social media network that wishes to write or read cookies (Instagram). You didn’t give permission for this.
Click here to allow this anyway
Sexism?
According to Kazarian, many female chess players abandon chess because they have other interests. But it is also often said that the male-dominated world of chess is not a pleasant environment in which to grow as a woman.
“I have never personally had any misogynistic experiences,” Kazarian says. “But it’s obviously true that people look at you. You stand out. I hope less and less in the future, because there are more women playing chess.”
Both Kazarian and Barbier hope that the imbalance between men and women in chess will gradually disappear. Thanks to the reduction of the gender gap, but also thanks to initiatives such as those of Barbier in Belgium and Kazarian in the Netherlands.
The first signs of such a revolution may even already be visible. Over the past few months, Sivanandan Bodhana from England has made a big impression in several smaller tournaments. Bodhana started playing chess only after the lockdown and has already toppled several grandmasters.
Sivanandan Bodhana is 8 years old.
Related:
2024-01-17 16:17:27
#Queen #Wanted #woman #chess #top