Don’t claim women are “naturally” inferior to men in any intellectual endeavor, argued pioneering feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792, unless you first grant girls the same opportunities to master it as boys. Today, that includes not chiding them as “unfeminine” for being chess geeks. Or, for not taking things seriously when they’re not, and want to learn the game in their own ways.

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes. Photo above by Chris Yang, below by Jennifer Marquez. (Both on Unsplash.)

Very few girls and women have ever made it to the ranks of the top 100 chess players. In fact, at the moment there aren’t any at all. For some pundits, including all too many of those top players, this is all the evidence they need to argue that women are “naturally” inferior at the game to men.

Alternatively, some people place a lot of weight on the fact that there’s only one female chess player for every nine males. Yes, some truly exceptional girls and women do make it to the top 100 players sometimes, they’d have to concede. (Most notably, Judit Polgar, who became a grandmaster at a younger age than Bobby Fischer, and who was once ranked #8 in the world.) They may even admit that the proportion that do, compared to all female players, is actually quite comparable to the proportion for male players that do too.

But that only further begs the questions of why more girls and women aren’t attracted to chess in the first place, or why they don’t stick with it.

Yes, there is rampant sexism in the sport. But surely no more than many other sports, and not enough to account for such a massively lopsided sex ratio? Maybe the main reason it doesn’t appeal is because, overall, they really are worse at some of the various attributes required for success in chess?

I frame the arguments like this because, until I started writing, I didn’t realize their connection. For whereas I’m a decent human being, and so have always rejected out of hand the notion that women are naturally inferior at any intellectual activity or profession whatsoever (or that any sex is, for that matter), the reality that there are indeed many various, incontrovertible, very specific skills and attributes in which men tend to perform better than women, and vice-versa, has also made a great deal of sense to me. Only, until today, I didn’t realize my own cognitive dissonance—that those slight differences in performance could be seized upon to justify those arguments that girls and women don’t belong in chess.

But also until today, I didn’t realize their awesome rejoinders, which is what I’ll cover here:

• That there’s far, far more to becoming a professional chess player than, say, being able to mentally rotate a three-dimensional object while doing a math test.
• That those methods girls and women tend to favor, despite what you may hear, are in no way less effective than those boys and men do.
• That a dominance of boys and men in any intellectual field, is not, ipso facto, evidence of their natural superiority in it. Because the barriers to girls’ and women’s participation in it can be far more insidious and subtle than most men, including myself, are aware.
• And that our brains have an enormous plasticity. To the extent that, once girls and women do fully participate in hitherto, naturally “masculine” intellectual activities (or boys and men in “feminine” ones for that matter), they are fully able to overcome those initial sex-based differences.

Here goes…

What do I Mean by Biological, Sex-based Differences?

So, despite that introduction trashing them, why do I also say those biological, sex-based differences still make a great deal of sense to me?

Well, first and foremost, because they jibe with my own experience as a chess nerd as a teenager, when I spent most of my free time at clubs and tournaments instead of driving lessons and dates. In between, I’d pore over my books into the small hours, rather than bothering with minutiae like completing homework, or doing more than the bare minimum to pass my high-school classes. Rest assured, I also noticed the almost complete lack of women playing chess, let alone girls my age. But I just took it for granted.

So today, whether posited as a misguided explanation for their relative absence as we’ll see, or just as a reasonable observation to add to the debate as to why that is, when chess trainers, professional players, and commentators alike routinely mention an obsessiveness they see in boys interested in chess but which seems almost non-existent in girls, I can’t help but nod in agreement.

Indeed, it’s a point made so often on chess YouTube or Twitch, I can’t pinpoint a specific clip to link to sorry. But desperate googling reveals a similar observation has been attributed to former world snooker champion Steve Davis, about why his sport is likewise so overwhelmingly male-dominated:

…[when] once asked to explain why men dominate snooker, even though it doesn’t require great strength…he gave a controversial but great answer that applies to snooker, chess and many other fields of endeavor.

He said, essentially, “Men are the idiots of the species. Men have a certain obsessiveness that women lack. We happily spend hours, months, years to become great at things that are a complete waste of time (like hitting balls into holes with a pointed stick).”

The Quora commenter who posted that continued:

Women COULD become elite chess or snooker players, but it requires a degree of obsession and an insane amount of work/practice that most women don’t see the value in. Women may enjoy playing chess or snooker, but not enough to devote their lives to it. And devoting your life may be exactly what it takes to become a champion.

But this also made sense because of my intellectual baggage. Specifically, in the form of the book, The New Sexual Revolution by Robert Pool (1993), that I picked up during my halcyon, impressionable first years at university, thinking women would be impressed by the title and cover. (Hey, this line of thinking did work eventually.) From it, I learned for the first time about multiple science, evidence-based examples of men and women tending to approach various tasks differently. Or, in many cases, having incontrovertible advantages over each other when performing the same task. An example of the former is that men usually navigate by streets and grids, women by landmarks. And of the latter, that overall men have demonstrably better greater spatial ability, as well as the ability to shoot moving targets, both of which prove to be independent of prior exposure or later training. What science says about those differences three decades later though, and their implications, I’ll get to soon. But crucial is that then—as now—Pool’s own speculations from those seem perfectly reasonable (pp. 61-62):

The male advantage in spatial ability probably has greater practical implications than other sex differences because it is one of the largest differences and because spatial ability is important in many jobs….Researchers have found…that the high school students with high spatial ability are the ones who are most successful in geometry, mechanical drawing and shop classes….the skills learned in those classes are important for careers in science, engineering, drafting and design, and studies have shown that high spatial ability is related to success in such diverse jobs as automotive mechanic, architect, and watch repairman.

The sex difference is spatial ability may spill over into mathematics, where males have a medium-sized edge….

Later still at university, those lessons would be reinforced by my finding myself in lectures about gynocentric feminism, which was presented to me as a school of feminist thought which was likewise concerned with highlighting sex-based differences, and positively revaluing what its advocates considered the ensuing core tenets of ‘femininity.’ In hindsight though, it was a much more fringe than my sympathetic professor suggested in the late-1990s, and was already well on its way out even then. But, you could also say it was just a twist on the nature-vs-nurture debate really—that all things being equal, would or do men and women gravitate towards different activities and professions based on these differences, and regardless that those dominated by women shouldn’t be undervalued—and which is still very much ongoing. Perhaps most interestingly and controversially at the moment, in the fact that even in Scandinavia, it is women who are still overwhelmingly plumping for caring, nurturing professions like teaching and nursing instead of those related to STEM. (Just because Jordan Peterson is one of the many people pointing this out, doesn’t make it untrue.)

To be clear, although Pool’s book was clearly formative, and I’ve been very receptive to the notion of fundamental, sex-based differences ever since, I’ve never been naïve either. Not about how absolutely no level playing field exists for entry into and success in hitherto “naturally” male-dominated interests and professions like chess, snooker, coding, engineering, and so on.

Or at least, I thought I’d never been naïve.

There’s More than One Way to Skin a Cat

Because today I learned that in addition to all the other, more obvious barriers and hurdles that discourage girls and women, that this extends to them even displaying the necessary character traits to succeed too. That it’s not that they don’t also want to geek out over the things only boys are “supposed” to like, necessarily. Just that if they do, they’re much more likely to be criticized for their obsessiveness. Whereas among boys and men, that same obsessiveness tends to be seen as a virtue instead.

See what I mean from this passage from Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez (2019), the inspiration for this post. If you’ll please bear with me, it’s five paragraphs long. But totally worth it for the aha! moment in the final two (pp. 95-96):

In 1984 American tech journalist Steven Levy published his bestselling book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Levy’s heroes were all brilliant. They were all single-minded. They were all men. They also didn’t get laid much. ‘You would hack, and you would live by the Hacker Ethic, and you knew that horribly inefficient and wasteful things like women burned too many cycles, occupied too much memory space,’ Levy explained. ‘Women, even today, are considered grossly unpredictable,’ one of his heroes told him. ‘How can a [default male] hacker tolerate such an imperfect being?’

Two paragraphs after having reported such blatant misogyny, Levy nevertheless found himself at a loss to explain why this culture was more or less ‘exclusively male’. ‘The sad fact was that there never was a star-quality female hacker’, he wrote. ‘No one knows why.’ I don’t know, Steve, we can probably take a wild guess.

By failing to make the obvious connection between an openly misogynistic culture and the mysterious lack of women, Levy contributed to the myth of innately talented hackers being implicitly male. And, today, it’s hard to think of a profession more in thrall to brilliance bias than computer science. ‘Where are the girls that love to program?’ asked a high-school teacher who took part in a summer programme for advanced-placement computer-science teachers at Carnegie Mellon; ‘I have any number of boys who really really love computers,’ he mused.55 ‘Several parents have told me their sons would be on the computer programming all night if they could. I have yet to run into a girl like that.’

This may be true, but as one of his fellow teachers pointed out, failing to exhibit this behaviour doesn’t mean that his female students don’t love computer science. Recalling her own student experience, she explained how she ‘fell in love’ with programming when she took her first course in college. But she didn’t stay up all night, or even spend a majority of her time programming. ‘Staying up all night doing something is a sign of single-mindedness and possibly immaturity as well as love for the subject. The girls may show their love for computers and computer science very differently. If you are looking for this type of obsessive behavior, then you are looking for a typically young, male behavior. While some girls will exhibit it, most won’t.’

Beyond its failure to account for female socialisation (girls are penalized for being antisocial in a way boys aren’t), the odd thing about framing an aptitude for computer science around typically male behaviour is that coding was originally seen as a woman’s game. In fact, women were the original ‘computers’, doing complex maths problems by hand for the military before the machine that took their name replaced them.

While I don’t know anything about coding, I’ve been dying for a chance to flex that I’m still a pretty damn good chess player. (And single; 진짜 뇌섹남 인데…) So, although chess too is not all it appears, and there are many ways to fall in love with it (a common sentiment is that it’s equal parts an art, a sport, and a science), I like to think I have some rare authority when I say that I still can’t see any real alternatives to its mastery other than long hours spent practicing, studying, and committing thousands of games, opening variations, tactical motifs, positional themes, and endgames to memory.

But then I thought again about how I did those, and took Perez’s point about staying up all night not being all it’s cracked up to be. Because in hindsight, much of what I worked on when I did was completely useless, even counterproductive, and made my schoolwork and non-existent social life suffer. At university later, it meant I failed easy classes, and am still suffering the consequences through my student loan repayments today. So, someone more mature and self-disciplined than I was back then, and more well-rounded, with actual friends and mentors to talk about learning, training, and—heaven forbid—topics unrelated to chess, would undoubtedly have made far more progress in chess in a fraction of the time that I did, let alone in many other aspects of their life.

Historically, Women Literally Couldn’t be Geniuses, Despite Ticking all the Boxes

Still wanting to flex how smart I am though (did I mention I’m single?), I want to causally convey how there must surely be a reason why chess is still considered a symbol of high intelligence, even genius too, at least in the West (I concede that Go is more complex. Or baduk as it’s known here, which all the geeks in Korea who would be playing chess are playing instead, damnit.). Also, to smoothly segue through that into the fact that we are indeed so wedded to the notion that related skills, talents, and traits are only virtues when possessed by men, that even the histories of the concept of “genius” and of the word itself contain this bias, especially in the last two centuries. As Christine Battersby explains in her pioneering 1989 book, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (pp. 8 & 11):

Starting from the persistence of sexual prejudice in art and literary criticism today, [in this book] I move back in time to explore the way our modern notions of creativity are modeled on notions of a male God creating the universe, and the devious tricks used to represent all creative and procreative power as he attribute of males….

Women’s inferiority had been rationalized by the writers in the Aristotelian tradition as a deficiency in judgement, wit, reason, skill, talent, and psychic (and bodily) heat. Women had been blamed for an excess of passion, imagination, sexual needs, and for vapor-induced delusion and irrationality. But if we look at the aesthetic literature of the late eighteenth century, we will see that the greatest males (the natural “geniuses”) were being praised for qualities of mind that seem prima facie identical with Aristotelian femininity. I discuss the new qualitative distinctions that were developed, that used different types of passion, imagination, frenzy, and irrationality to account for the difference between geniuses and females. A man with genius was like a woman—but was not a woman….the revalued “feminine” qualities of mind were appropriated for a supermale sex….

Why does it matter that, whereas ordinary males have been blamed for effeminacy, in (male) geniuses femininity has been transformed into a virtue? I hope this book will make clear how women have been presented with contradictory evaluative norms against which to measure their attainments.

Or indeed, this very accessible 2021 lecture:

“Hard-wired” Differences These Ain’t

Remember those incontrovertible sex-based differences Pool discussed in 1993 though? To follow this audacious history of belittling, denying, and hiding women’s genius by pointing out the verdict of 2023 is…that these differences very much still exist, feels churlish, almost rude. But here’s the rub: they’re easily overcome. As Andrew Curry explains in, given my own 30-year fixation with those differences, an even more eye-opening—I want to say shocking—article at Nautilus:

George M. Bodner, a professor of chemical education at Purdue University….stresses it’s important not to perpetuate the myth that a gender gap implies all men are better than all women at spatial cognition tasks. Stereotypes about spatial ability can have an insidious effect. “When women hear myths, such as the idea that they have ‘poor spatial ability when compared with men,’ they often believe this will be true for themselves, and it often is not true,” Bodner says.

Had [Sheryl Sorby, a professor of engineering education at Ohio State University] been a little less stubborn, she might have left engineering altogether. Instead she went on to earn a bachelor’s and then a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Michigan Tech, and was later hired as a faculty member. As Sorby took more engineering courses, she got better at spatial cognition tasks, until eventually she found herself teaching engineering graphics, the very course that almost derailed her as an undergrad. “The brain is pretty plastic when it comes to spatial skills,” Sorby says. “I have improved my spatial skills vastly as an adult.”

That initial experience never left her, though. As a professor, she noticed talented young women struggling the way she had. So she set out to find a solution. “The fact that there are these gender gaps is a challenge, but it’s not a death sentence,” she says. “I know it’s something we can fix.”

With her colleague, Beverly J. Baartmans, she developed a spatial visualization course to help her students develop their spatial cognition skills.

That course was just 15 hours long, and even improved men’s abilities as well, despite being given a biological head start. And, because I can’t even begin to convey the magnitude of what this brain plasticity implies for future sex and gender roles, let alone playing chess? I can’t think of a better way to end this post than recommending you head straight over to Nautilus to read the rest of the article!

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