วันเสาร์ที่ 9 กรกฎาคม พ.ศ. 2559

4 Young Chess Masters Tackle a Persistent Puzzle: The Gender Gap

Maggie Feng, 15, at the Marshall Chess Club in New York on Wednesday. She was one of four female masters to participate in an elite clinic at the club. Credit Alex Wroblewski/The New York Times
Fourteen of the nation’s top young chess masters came to New York this week for an elite clinic at the Marshall Chess Club. Four of them were girls. For proponents of gender parity in chess, this was progress.
At a front table, as several boys yelled out answers to a chess puzzle, Carissa Yip, 12, handed a yellow paper to the instructor, Greg Shahade. “You wrote down one move,” Mr. Shahade said. “That’s it?”
Carissa, who at age 11 became the youngest American girl ever to attain the rank of master, did not blink. “It’s a brilliant move,” she deadpanned. “You’re so needy.”
It is one of the vexing questions in chess: Why, in a sport where physical differences do not matter, are boys and men so much more prominent than their female counterparts, despite efforts to attract more girls and women?
The British grandmaster Nigel Short inflamed the debate last year by writing in New in Chess magazine that men’s brains were simply better wired for chess and that instead of “fretting about inequality, perhaps we should just gracefully accept it as a fact.”
In response, several female players, using the hashtag #sexisminchess, wrote of being belittled, harassed, stalked or propositioned at tournaments. Some of the strongest response came from the retired grandmaster Judit Polgar, who beat Mr. Short eight times, with only three losses and five draws.
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Jennifer Yu, 14, at the club. She said that before she became known, boys often expected her to be a weak player because she was a girl. Credit Alex Wroblewski/The New York Times
The gender gap has especially perplexed educators, who say chess helps students learn to solve problems, improve their concentration, delay gratification and socialize with peers. At school tournaments, boys typically outnumber girls by two or three to one, and the gap gets wider as the level of play rises; none of the world’s 100 highest-rated players is female.
Explanations for the imbalance ring familiar: a shortage of female role models, less encouragement from parents and teachers, an unwelcoming atmosphere in what has traditionally been a boys’ club.
“It seems to follow the STEM conversation,” said Marley Kaplan, president of Chess in the Schools, a nonprofit organization that teaches the game to 13,000 students in 50 New York City public schools, referring to the gender gap in science, technology, engineering and math education. “I wish somebody would do some real research into it. Everybody knows about it, but nobody knows why.”
To Carissa, the gender gap was an advantage.
“It’s much better to be a girl,” she said. “In chess if you’re 2200 and you’re a guy, that’s not really important,” she said, referring to a competitive rating that qualifies the holder as a master (Carissa, who is the top-rated 12-year-old girl in the U.S. Chess Federation, is 2286; grandmasters are 2500 and up). “But if you’re 2200 and you’re a girl, that’s pretty good. You get more publicity if you’re a girl and you’re the same strength.”
Her father, Percy Yip, who works in information technology, said that when she started, he had some “misconceptions” about girls and chess.
“There’s a culture that parents should take girls to dancing class, not to chess,” Mr. Yip said. “When she said she wanted to play chess, I said, ‘No, no, it’s not easy; you probably won’t like it.’”
Carissa Yip is the top-rated 12-year-old girl in the U.S. Chess Federation. Credit Alex Wroblewski/The New York Times
To address the gender gap, some programs, like the Success Academy charter school network, have created separate clubs or tournaments for girls.
“It’s something I am very conscious of,” said Eva S. Moskowitz, the network’s chief executive. “One has to make it a safe and inviting space. It doesn’t help that most teachers are male. We’ve gone to lengths to bring Judit Polgar and Irina Krush to play at the schools. It’s inspiring for our girls to see these amazing women.”
Even so, Ms. Moskowitz said, the percentage of girls playing waned in middle school, and dwindled to “very few girls playing in high school.”
At the Marshall Chess Club on Wednesday, three of the girls were silent through most of the lessons, while a group of boys practically bounced out of their seats, periodically getting sent out of the room for their behavior.
But Mr. Shahade, whose sister Jennifer is a former national women’s champion and author of the books “Chess Bitch” and “Play Like a Girl,” said the behavior had more to do with age than gender: The rambunctious boys were younger, and the girls had been just as loud at their age.
Maggie Feng, 15, the oldest and quietest girl in the group, said she was drawn to the abstract side of chess: analyzing novel positions or strategies. In spring, she became the first girl ever to win the American championship for players in ninth grade and younger, a title previously won by Fabiano Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura, the two top players in the United States.
Greg Shahade, right, the instructor at the clinic at the Marshall Chess Club. Credit Alex Wroblewski/The New York Times
Most of her female peers, Maggie said, were not interested in chess. “Not many girls really know chess,” she said.
To test the social effects of gender on chess, researchers in Padua, Italy, matched male and female players of equal ratings and had them play online.
The 2007 study, reported in The European Journal of Social Psychology, was very small but produced intriguing results. When women did not know their opponents’ gender or thought they were playing other women, they won about half of the games. But when they thought their opponents were male, they won only one in four games, even though they faced the same opponents in all conditions.
The women also played less aggressively and displayed lower self-esteem against “male” opponents. The researchers surmised that a reason men dominate the game’s top levels may be that women perceive themselves as minorities in tournaments and lose confidence, causing them to perform below their abilities.
Ms. Polgar, who is widely considered the best female chess player ever, said women were often held back by lower ambition, choosing to play in the less competitive all-female events rather than in open tournaments.
“In practice, not many ladies are competing on the highest level,” she said from Hungary. “But many of the ladies are very happy that it’s separate, because this way they also become world champions. But they could be better and go higher.”
At the Marshall, Jennifer Yu, 14, from Ashburn, Va., said she hoped to break that stereotype, adding that before she became known, boys often expected her to be a weak player because she was a girl.
“The way it’s depicted in the culture, you don’t see many girls playing,” she said. “I wanted to play. I don’t care that I was the only girl playing, and I don’t care what people say.”

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