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