http://hubpages.com/hub/Teaching-Chess-To-Your-Daughter
Controversial statements about girls and women in chess -- do you agree? Disagree? Are girls really smarter than boys?

As a male, I am probably too stupid to see any controversy.

Girls are smarter than boys in some ways and boys are smarter in others. I think the article supports this statement.

I can totally relate to the observation that in the chess beginner classes girls are better than boys in solving puzzles. My sister, who played only a handful of chess games in her whole life, none of them fully legal, once stunned me when she suggested a Knight maneuver worthy of Rubinstein while watching me play online. In general, girls are better in figuring out a new situation, being able to apply generic concepts to a new set of rules.

On the other hand, while it's not specifically mentioned in the article, "Kids who are brought up eating, sleeping and breathing chess 24/7" should be overwhelmingly boys. I believe, boys can excel in being single-minded a lot more than girls, and thus achieve the heights of some specific and often very narrow intellectual endeavor.

The article is largely void of any usable information. Plenty of anecdote and story telling though. We cannot draw valid conclusions from a handful of isolated stories or experiences--despite the very human tendency to be absolutely certain that we can draw such conclusions.

On standardized academic skills tests boys and girls are virtually indistinguishable at the center of the distribution (they have nearly identical means). At the extremes, in both directions, you find more boys. Sometimes the extreme 2-5% of scores are populated exclusively by boys.

Do boys and girls have wildly different styles when it comes to puzzle solving or other academically oriented tasks? Absolutely. That doesn't make one group smarter than the other, just different in how they approach the world.

One of the differences is that girls are more likely to favor cooperative activities compared to boys. It is generally a lot easier to get a boy to study chess 24/7 than it is to get a girl to do the same thing.

Women are excelling at Law and Medicine while failing to make much progress in engineering or natural sciences. These differences are increasingly being tied to differences in the choices that genders make as they move into adulthood. They cannot be explained by academic differences between the groups.

Trying to come up with something original, but Spock has hit all the points first, in about the same order I was thinking too.

I have noticed that there are more women in undergraduate biology than men. I saw this at three different universities (two in central Canada, one on the west coast). First year students were a fairly even mix, but as you went up to third and fourth year, it wasn't unusual to have an all female class with a (lucky?) male thrown in, and this pattern held over 5 years.

There were also far more women in the biology graduate department doing their degrees (but that's only two years observation). I also now notice that many of the full-time jobs available have gone to women, including some of the big-honcho type jobs (at least in the sector of government in which I sometimes work. Over the past 17 years, the local offices have gone from mostly males to mostly females, all working in the natural science sectors).

I don't know if any of that translates to Canada or US-wide trends though, or if it is even a trend at a local level.

Interesting, I would have predicted biology remaining predominantly male. At the undergrad level I would suspect medicine as a driving force. No idea what might be going on at the grad level.

Hmmm, this is intriguing. What is it about biology that is attractive to women? Or is there more success for women in the natural sciences than we've been lead to believe? Anyone have gender counts on chemists or physicists? Anyone know if Ken's observations generalize more broadly?

I'm sure the Quota Police are working on it as we speak.

I do know the women now outnumber men in general in college.

Interesting point about boys being more single minded. I'd never thought about that before. I have always envied the ability of my male chess friends to be so single minded about chess, so focused, and wished I could be more like that.

Anthea, trust me--you don't.

Being single-minded is great for accomplishing one particular task. Where I hit difficulty is if I have three or four projects that all need equal time. Unless I know I have a few uninterrupted hours to work on something, I have problems actually starting. E.g. if I have a conference call coming in at 10, I don't want to dive into focusing on a project at 9. So I tend to fill that hour with trivial stuff (answering emails, skimming articles, doing those little office errands).

I envy my colleagues who can jump into the middle of a big project, do some work on it for 30 to 60 minutes, then jump to something else. I just can't do the deep work mindset unless I know I'll be staying in that mindset for a few hours.

Yeah, I do that too. There are things that sit on my Task List far too long just because I want to do them all at once, and other things that get checked off in droves the same day. If I could do them 5 minutes at a time, they'd have been done long ago.

Men are men because the best of them care about intangible--and from a strictly materialistic standpoint--impractical things like honor, truth, justice, and the arts and sciences. Men keep the human race striving, for, again, the best of them are ever restless, ever seeking and striving to know more, do more, and experience more. Men, in evolutionary terms, are liberals (older use of the term, I hasten to add).

Women are conservative. They stand for what is, always. They are the fixed force against which men generate life-giving, creative tension--or simply batter themselves senseless. Women say with their very bodies, "I am here to tell you that individuals, while cute and often interesting, must inevitably bow to the collective need to produce more warm bodies! Life must go on, and that it does go on is incomparably more important than anything else you will ever do."

Put succinctly, men make war, poetry, and philosophy, and women make men.

Given the truth of the above, to which the ages attest, is it any wonder that all of the world chess champions have been men? No woman has ever been willing to ruthlessly subordinate herself to something as essentially trivial as chess. I doubt any woman ever will. Yet without that ability, without that searing, almost-blind-to-everything-else competitiveness, women at the highest levels in chess will always remain severely handicapped.

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Well said, and I'm all in favor of this politically incorrect viewpoint.

However, I think what you said, is true of a large number of women, but true only of a small number of men. I do not think that truth, honor, justice, arts and sciences are pursued by most or even a large number of men. Only a few do. The rest are stuck up with leisure, convenience, camaraderie, food, bikes, corruption and what have you, and yes, women. Not the exalted stuff!

Besides, art, music, poetry and philosophy are hardly the exclusive prerogative of men. Music composition, yes, there seems to be a glaring difference. But in musicianship otherwise, I think women are pretty much neck and neck.

However, one has to understand that these observations are without controlling for factors related to upbringing. For example, to determine whether women and men are comparable in terms of single-mindedness, one has to select men and women who were provided the same encouragement and opportunities to be single-minded. A larger proportion of men would receive such facilitation, while women would mostly receive hostility than facilitation from society. Only very progressive minded parents, and with generous resources, could be expected to give their daughters a free hand. So, it wouldn't be an apples to apples comparison unless one controls for these.

And besides, I do not think it's fair to apply men's yardsticks to women, any more than it's fair to judge a footballer by his cricket skills or vice-versa.

By the way, have you read Shaw's Man and Superman? You'd find it a highly entertaining read on the subject, with more than a dollop of Nietzsche-ic views, similar to yours!

And just as we are on this topic: Mt Everest on noodles

And we thought only Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary would have the single-mindedness...?

"However, I think what you said, is true of a large number of women, but true only of a small number of men."--proloy

You read my post so fast you must have missed this part, right up front: "...because the best of them..."

The average herd male cares mainly about status competition and getting laid. His place in the pecking order is all-important to him because it largely determines his income, which in turn largely determines his access to sexually attractive women (few of whom will screw for anything less than some sort of compensation, be it fancy meals and flowers, cars, houses, or just plain old cash). This desire for sex is so overwhelming that, as can be seen on the true-crime shows, some herd men are so unable to control their desire that they see a woman, rape her on the spot, then, in the aftermath of fulfillment, are terrified of getting caught, so they murder her and dispose of her body in half-ass fashion, getting caught quickly in most cases. Lest you think this is confined to so-called "lower class" men (as if money ever had anything to do with class!), here's an amusing tidbit from the book I'm currently reading, by Robert M. Gates, called From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War: "...a 1968 report from Iran graphically detailing visiting Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin's success at a state dinner in caressing the inner thighs of the wife of the Iranian governor-general and her corresponding 'Iranian dance of hands, head and bosom.'" At the time, this guy was one of the most powerful men in the Soviet government, and here he was, at an important state dinner, unable to keep his hands off a sexually attractive woman.

I seriously doubt whether any women have ever reached the heights of not only the compositions of men like Beethoven or Bach, but the musicianship of men like Artur Rubinstein. Even on a lower level, such as rock music, I don't believe any women performers have displayed the virtuosity of say, Jimmy Page or Jimi Hendrix. When it comes to lyrics, though--and here science can prove the general superiority of the average woman in the use of language (men are better at visual, spatial stuff)--women often equal or excel the men. "You gave away the things you love, and one of them was me...I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee," is a good example of some superb lyrics (just quoted that one off the top of my head from the song I heard on the radio driving home yesterday, so I hope I got it right!).

As for what I will dub (to keep this post moving along) the "controlling factors" argument, well, I don't think that argument holds up any more. Women, at least in the West, have had full access to education for well over a hundred years, and so, if limited educational opportunities were an important factor in holding them back--and that limitation is gone now--then where are the women who have achieved at the level of the greatest male artists, musicians, poets, philosophers, and so forth? Or take a look at the career of GM Judit Polgar, who is far and away the greatest woman chess player of all time--no other woman player even comes close. She made it into the top ten but never gained a realistic chance of playing for the title. Her upbringing was everything a feminist could dream of, and she was born brilliant as well as hard-working. Yet you never hear of her, as an adult, spending ten to twelve to fourteen hours a day on chess, as was spent by Fischer, routinely. In fact, you never hear of ANY woman player working that hard on chess. But then again, you never heard of any woman player going nuts after playing and studying chess too intensively, and that certainly keeps things balanced.

Just take a look at rock music. Show me one top-selling woman artist who isn't young (or no more than middle-aged, but still looking good!) and sexually attractive. This isn't true of every one of the male artists, though it's true of a great many of them. Look at women in the commercials, or journalism, or in just about anything aimed at the masses. Women are almost invariably presented as sex objects. If they don't like it, why don't they stop it? Of course, there have been some changes. For example, there are a great many women coroners and pathologists now, where before there were hardly any. I suppose now if the Dirty Harry movie The Enforcer were re-made, it would be Dirty Harriet, and her younger, rookie partner would be a guy who would be portrayed as having been made uncomfortable by the brash, tough--but still big-breasted and sexy!--female pathologist, who would say that she recovered something from the stomach of the corpse that said, "Eat at Luigi's."

Yes, I've read that one by Shaw. As an English major, you have to read stuff like that. Shaw is terribly dull, and overrated. If you think that I think like Nietzsche, then you either haven't understood his works or my posts. I'm nothing like him. Be sure you've read the newer editions of his works, though. For a long time, some family members of his (hell, I forget--was it his sister and her husband?) screwed up the perception of his works. The only thing I can say in his favor is that he would have hated the Nazis and had he still been alive in that shithole of a country, he would have got out of there ASAP.

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Thanks, tragedy, for playing decent.
For being direct like a bullet, albeit distant.
For not wasting time, for happening in an instant.

--Joseph Brodsky, "Portrait of Tragedy"

This is way too long! Can someone summarize it for me?

There's no way we are getting girls with long-winded speeches like that. I know that much. In fact I may not know much about girls but I know a lot about how to chase them away and this one here is a classic!

I also consider this thread false advertising - all talk and no girls. Pretty much like high-school.

The summation of CK's post is this:

We're all cave men where ultimately our sex drive also drives our competitive nature, and that's why men are better at chess than women.

Got it and much appreciated!

That last part does not sum up though - we are driven by sex drive so we ... play chess?

I don't think there has been a recorded case of chess leading to any kind of sex since Capablanca.

I always thought it's more like
- "We can't get laid so we have to kill some time."
- "Are you sure we can't get laid?"
- "Dude, let's get real - we belong to a chess club - even bowling is better for meeting girls."

LOL!! That does remind me of the high school chess club.

Reminds me of a late night chess club session, where one guy kept telling dumb jokes (no, it wasn't me), and kept annoyingly asking everyone "Do you get it? Do you get it?" after he told them. Another guy finally said "Look, if we could get it, we wouldn't be here playing chess!"