At the very top of chess, the grandmaster don’t have to accept a challange match, right? I don’t see how an old-boy’s network can be completely avoided.

The bias is pervasive and even the blokes, like Sean, who champion women’s rights fall prey to it from time to time. Here’s an example: we were recently brainstorming on names of possible new folks to join us here at CV. The name of someone I’ll call A Theorist was mentioned. Sean wrote back that A Theorist probably wouldn’t be interested because he’s too high up in the physics political hierarchy. That really struck me. Because I am basically on the same political cmttes/panels that A Theorist is on, plus one more.

How do you know that Sean would not have made the same comment, if you were male? Perhaps he views you as atypical for reasons having nothing to do with your sex. Is there not the slightest possibility that your sexism detector requires a bit of recalibration?

Again and again — I have no problem at all with the idea that there are statistical differences in various qualities between men and women. There obviously are, e.g. for height. I also couldn’t care less. What I care about is removing barriers to people living their lives as they want to, and combating the kind of prejudice that elevates local conditions to laws of nature.

On this gender brain difference issue, it bemuses me that it is always the supposed male advantage that is under attack and doubted and scorned and explained away, and never the supposed female advantage. What is wrong with all our little boys that they cannot keep up to the little girls in reading and comprehension and verbal skills? Those differences are never tackled, they are assumed to be innate female advantages and heck, I accept that. Don’t you? Or do you believe men have the capacity to be as strong as women in those areas but, what, society or the educational system or whatever, is holding men back and unduly and unfairly depriving them of equal verbal skills?

Where does it say that females can have unquestioned innate advantages in some areas, and males cannot in others? If females are as equal as men in the (alleged) men’s strengths, and more than equal in their own, then doesn’t that make females more than equal in the aggregate? Gee how fair is that?

We’re different. Viva it.

I don’t have exact numbers, I’m not sure they exist, but in my experience there are at least as many women who play the game as men.

Ask any bridge player, even female players, and there will be close to unanimous agreement that men are stronger players. The average male is a stronger player. The top levels, the national and world tournaments, are all hugely dominated by males. At the toughest competitions, 95% of the entrants will be males.

At tournaments, women even have their own separate contests. There is a Women’s Pairs event, for example. These contests exist to give women a better chance of winning; the competition simply isn’t as strong.

(As an aside, there used to be separate men’s events as well, and those were the toughest events. Those ended maybe 20 years ago when a couple of females sued to play in the Men’s events, and rather than face a protracted and expensive court challenge, the bridge authorities caved and ended all men-only events. Gee thanks. No male has sued to play in the female events.)

Men are more aggressive at the tables and they seem to see deeper into the complexities of card-play.

I read somewhere once, that males are generally better at drilling down on one complex issue, whereas females are better at multitasking. Certainly men can drill down at the bridge table better than women.

Most importantly, please let me be clear: I was not making a dig at Sean. There isn’t anybody I respect more. I was merely trying to illustrate how easy it is for any of us to say something that can discount a woman’s impact. It truly happens quite often! I apologize to Sean that my comment was so poorly written and so easily misconstrued.

Now, back to my calculations of Supersymmetry at the Linear Collider…

Committee memberships are not a good measure of seniority, especially in
cases of gender comparison, because women get appointed to committees more
rapidly than men, so the women on high-ranking committees are likely to be
more junior in an absolute sense. I say this because (a) I have female colleagues who perceive/remark on this burden and (b) I have seen the effect
firsthand, when I turned down a committee assignment and suggested a colleague who might serve instead. This colleague has a gender-ambiguous name which is more often used for women than men. The program officer (a
woman) was very enthusiastic until she realised this colleague was, in fact, male.
At that point she lost all interest.

Of course, if everyone adopted positions in the grey area, there wouldn’t be much to post about…

It would be interesting to know what these people think about under-represented minorities in science. Though they invoke unspecified gender differences, I don’t know if they would now be that comfortable in polite society attributing similar differences to ethnicity.

When I was an undergrad, a visiting speaker, in a casual conversation at lunch, told a female undergrad (or said it within her earshot) “Women can’t do physics.” I think few people would feel free to say that today. But the same guy probably still thinks it.

SIT (Strong Inherent Theory) - differences in performance (in chess, math, science, whatever) are ALMOST ALL due to differences in inherent ability.

IT (Inherent Theory) - SOME OF the difference in peformance is due to differences in inherent ability.

SET (Strong Environmental Theory) - differences in performance are ALMOST ALL due to differences in environmental factors.

ET (Environmental Theory) - SOME OF the difference in performance is due to differences in environmental factors.

It’s not clear to me whether Sean is arguing against IT, or only against SIT. Arguments in favor of IT are NOT arguments against ET, and vice-versa. It’s only if someone wants to argue for the Strong versions (either SIT or SET) that they have to oppose the contrary view.

My own view is that IT and ET are both true, and so SIT and SET are both false, and that this is compatible with all the evidence offered by both sides in this debate.

I write this as an example as how even folks with the best of intentions can slip and say things without thinking.

Otoh, the statistics are pretty bad there, particularly in chess. Its quite conceivable a good factor of 2 or 3 of that is just randomness, so its hard to quite make that conclusion.

Female to total players ratio in international competitive chess, January 2007.

5029/77144 = 6.5% (all rating levels)
3587/58179= 6.2% (over 2000, superior to strong club players)
1768/39155= 4.5% (over 2100)
697/20743= 3.4% (over 2200)
223/7971= 2.8% (over 2300)
66/2715= 2.4% (over 2400)
10/771= 1.3% (over 2500, grandmaster level)
1/151 = 0.7% (over 2600)

Although men constitute an overwhelming majority (93.5%) of all competitive chess players, there are thousands of active female players on the international rating list. Yet only a handful of them reach the grandmaster level where men are about 5 times more populous than their overall share would suggest. Women can hold up to their 6% representation up to the 2000 rating level or so, but beyond that it falls rapidly for whatever reason.

You say:
Women don’t enjoy math or physics so they don’t go into it.

I’ a woman who very much enjoys math and physics and still have a hard time getting through it– not because of the intellectual challenges, but because of the personal challenges presented by often times being amongst those who imply that I must be inferior due to my gender.

Beyond the ridiculous “you’re a girl, you can’t do physics” remark I received as a freshman undergrad, I’ve had many experiences with less-than-overt discouragement.

Not all women enjoy math or physics, but the ones that do shouldn’t feel as though they’ll need to be 20 times better than their male counterparts in order to succeed. Even with massive amounts of determination, it’s still one of the most difficult things I have to overcome.

Mr Knightley: [...] men are more given to obsessing over things like chess and physics than women. Could this be added to the list of contributing factors?

If I come to think about chess, well. There were the chess groups at school were all the nerdy guys went, and obviously my maths teacher wanted me to go there. I went there once. See, the reason is simply that I don’t understand how men can be so obsessed about a game. And it’s not only chess. I’ve had a whole bunch of male friends who spent days-and-nights (literally) on some computer game. None of my girlfriends ever did. I had a phase where I’d play computer games, but I easily get bored by virtual reality. Why would I spend my time with a game if there’s a real world out there that wants to be understood?

Maybe I’d be a total looser at chess, but I was much more afraid I might actually be pretty good at it and then spend the rest of my life shifting figures. I too would say there are less women in chess because they just don’t want to. And yes, I find it very possible that gender itself influences what a person finds interesting - on average - a priory that’s got nothing to do with intelligence.

Maybe the “innate difference” is that women are *more* rational. Going into science is fundamentally pretty irrational. Spend years of your life making little to no money, with some chance of never finishing at all, and even if you do, little chance that you’ll be able to find a job in the field afterwards. If you are lucky enough to find a job, chances are you’ll never make enough to justify the years of school. You could’ve gone to med school or law school instead.