I love science, because the universe has very little tolerance for wishful thinking. You can believe whatever kind of nonsense you like about how the world works, but eventually the data will come along and slap you upside the head. Sadly, not everyone lets the sting of reality affect their prejudices, but that’s another story.
Here’s a fact: among chess grandmasters, there are a lot more men than women. Chess is great, because it’s pretty much a meritocracy, not an old-boys network (colorful parables notwithstanding). There is a simple old-fashioned sexist explanation for this phenomenon, which is that women just aren’t as good at chess as men are. Back in the veldt, you see, when the men were celebrating a successful hunt by playing chess with sticks in the dirt, the women were busy washing the dishes, so there was no evolutionary pressure for them to develop those skills. These days, however, there is a more sophisticated new-fangled sexist explanation for these kinds of discrepancies, which invokes bell curves. It’s not, so the story goes, that the average woman isn’t just as good as the average man, it’s just that their standard deviations are different, so there is underrepresentation at the high end. This hypothesis suffers under the weight of making all sorts of predictions that aren’t true, but it’s kind of scientific-sounding, so it’s gained a measure of popularity in certain circles.
So now someone has looked in detail at the situation in chess. Jake Young at Pure Pedantry points to a study by Chabris and Glickman, “Sex Differences in Intellectual Performance: Analysis of a Large Cohort of Competitive Chess Players.” I noticed the link at Marginal Revolution, and I agree with Tyler Cowen about the most striking findings:
They found no greater variance in men than women. It had been suggested that since science selects for individuals at the upper tail of the distribution, a higher variance in men than women might explain their greater representation. However, the researchers found that — with respect to chess — if anything in most age groups women had a higher variance then men. Upper tail effects do not explain the differences in the numbers of grandmasters…
And:
If you look at the participation rate of women and relate that to performance, you find that in cases where the participation rate of women and men is equal the disparity in ability vanishes. Basically, this means that in zip codes where there are equal numbers of men and women players there is no great disparity between male and female ability — and certainly not a disparity in ability large enough to explain the difference in the numbers of grandmasters.
How about that? It’s not any differences in innate ability, it’s just that women are “choosing” not to play competitive chess. Choosing is put in scare quotes because there’s obviously going to be a great deal of influence from parents encouraging/discouraging their kids at a very young age, but whatever. It’s a shame if young girls who would have been enthusiastic about chess are pushed away by social pressures of one form or another, but for most people chess is not a central part of their lives.
It’s a much bigger deal when women (or whomever) are enthusiastic about choosing something as a career, and are pushed away by an impressive battery of systematic biases. Which is what is clearly going on in science, especially in physics. If girls are given just as much encouragement and opportunity as boys are, and nevertheless choose to become truck drivers or gourmet chefs rather than scientists, that’s fine with me — the goal has never been equal representation of the genders, it’s equal chances for everyone to do what they find interesting. But we have a long way to go before we get there.
Pingback: Dadblog » Why active discrimation in education matters
I cannot speak for the world of chess, but I can for the world of competitive bridge. Bridge is very much a deep intellectual pursuit, and in the long term is a 100% skill game, although luck does play a role in the short term. Many chess players also play bridge; it seems to attract the same kinds of personalities, although bridge is a more social game and not quite so hard on the ego. After all, you have an idiot partner to blame if the match goes wrong.
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.
I doesn’t matter how many serious studies you do, how carefully you control for all the variables, how patiently you explain the concepts of selection effects and systematic errors, how much data you collect on egregious bias. Some guy is always going to come along with some home-spun folk wisdom and an unshakable conviction that his gender is superior.
Sean: That would my ‘home-spun folk wisdom’ I suspect. You knee-jerked a thoughtless response. You know the bridge scene? You have played high-level competitive bridge? You have interviewed bridge players male and female about the gender difference in bridge achievements? Do you have any idea of what kind of talents are required to play the game at a high level? Of course you don’t; my comments if accurate simply don’t fit your view of how you think the world should be.
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.
My response was not knee-jerk, it was tired from repeating the same thing over and over. Your undoubted familiarity with the bridge scene is completely irrelevant. It’s not a controlled experiment, and all the raw statistics in the world don’t tell you anything about causality. I linked to an actual attempt to control for external variables; did you read it?
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.
JoAnne wrote:
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?
Pingback: Computer » Links ...
My son goes to a school where all the kids are above average.
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.
Maybe the reason women chose not to play chess, is because it’s an alpha male thing to be the grandmaster. I bet the only reason women do not become a grandmaster, is because of the title. Grandmaster is a word in the root of everyone’s minds that triggers a view that a grandmaster should be an alpha male/female; women may naturally stay clear of such a title.