Hello:
I am a parent who runs an elementary k-5 chess club, meeting weekly with approx 100 players. Burleigh Elementary where the club and students attend has been very supportive but recently posed a question I couldn’t answer. How could I improve the girl boy ratio in the club? My current ratio is approx 9 boys to every girl. I realize the chess universe is out of balance on this issue as well but I think it is better than 9-1. Any advise to a male organizer looking to recruit girls to the club? Yes I do realize how this sounds and therefore must be a consideration in a potential solution.
Current Status:
The club is free to all students:
We meet before school on Fridays which avoids almost all conflicts:
I have male and female volunteers helping during the sessions each week:
All matches are based on skill (not age or gender)
The attrition rate is higher with the weaker players (in general the girls make up a larger percentage of this pool) Do I need to teach them differently?
Any ideas on recruiting and maintaining the female players is appreciated.
The ratio is hard to fight. Get parental support. Include female role models in the instruction. Keep the boys under control in “class time” so that they don’t completely dominate the conversation.
Get the girl players to recruit other girls. However, try to insist that this not be “peer pressure” recruitment. Whatever the reason are that the girls are playing, may be how to get other girls involved. Also, maybe consider offering once a month (on another morning) a girls only class. Maybe even have the class with only the female supervisor present. There are studies that show that girls do better at math in an all girls class, maybe that can carry over into chess. Also, make certain to emphasis politeness and sportsmanship. You may even want to go so far as to offer a prize for best girl and best boy player at the end of the year.
Personally, I wouldn’t worry about it. Regardless of the conventional wisdom, girls and boys actually have different interests. It doesn’t sound like the club is hostile to girls. As long as it isn’t, you are going to spend time and energy trying to “correct” human nature. Just create a friendly club and let it end there.
I wouldn’t do this unless I was offering the same thing for the boys.
Unless the boys are being rude, I don’t agree with this either. You are putting a cap on the natural instincts of the boys (being assertive and competitive) in the interests of the girls. Most likely you are going to start discouraging the boys. You want the boys to learn discipline and sportsmanship, but that doesn’t mean the boys should be tamped down for the girls. Most likely, the boys have to put up with that throughout the school day. If you want to do that, split the boys and girls completely and be done with it.
The attrition rate of girls and boys as they age out of elementary school to junior high school and beyond is about the same. Schoolwork, sports, and other activities start to take up more time. One of the problems is the lower numbers of girls who try chess compared to boys. There are always more boys who come to a scholastic club. However, if there is a core group or “critical mass” of girls who start out together, they tend to stick it out. Then you have individuals who can recruit and be role models for the younger kids.
One scholastic club I worked with had a special class for girls only. It was designed to help them improve their game. The focus was on tactics and analyzing positions. They received puzzles to do. Examples of women’s chess games were shown as well as talks on the history of women in chess. It was a serious, but not too serious, class on the game. They went from talking about “horsies” to how to shatter a king’s castled position with sacrifices. A few boys grumbled a bit about favoritism, but there was enough for them to do and they always got more than enough attention.
My assessment over the years while working with boys and girls is that there is no significant difference between their abilities and talent to play chess. Boys do not necessarily see more or play better. The spatial abilities of girls are just fine. It is just that fewer girls try the game. They are usually not as encouraged to be competitive as boys. It isn’t that they are not naturally competitive, they have not been pushed to be as competitive as boys, at least not in chess. When I look at girls in sports, they are just as driven and as aggressive as their male counterparts. Maybe even a little more disciplined in preparation. Girls like winning just as much as boys.
People are often surprised when they see girls and women play chess on a high level. It isn’t expected to see a natural born killer, an assassin who wants to crush your soul when you look at an angelic face with a bright smile who sits there quietly planning your demise at the chessboard. Having taught chess to some cute but deadly players, I can understand how unnerving it can be to see them gleefully swooping in for the kill.
It sounds like PA is doing well as far as the female attrition rate goes if both girls and boys attrition at the same rate. With the ratio sounding like it stays constant then one thing that might be looked at is how to get more of the initial girls (K-2).
In the Chicago area I generally see the boy/girl ratio around 50/50 in K-2, reaching 75/25 by 5th grade, 90/10 by 8th grade and 99/1 by the senior year of high school. If the number of girls was higher then we would have had more than Julie Oberweis and Kimberly Goodwin winning the IL K-8 state in the past couple of decades (which matches up with a 90/10 ratio).
Hello:
Thank you for your contributions. I would like to summarize the ideas and ask for a little clarity:
Better recruitment especially at the early stages K-2:
Girls helping to recruit other girls (but no peer pressure). I have found if I have a strong male player I will get more players from that classroom with other students joining throughout the year. I rarely get girls bringing their friends. How do you encourage this?
The primary recruiting of new players is done on picture day when parents are also in attendence. However every year I am directly next to the girl scouts (the two largest recruiters), I always thought this was good but rarely got cross over. Can I use this as an advantage?
Outside the forum a suggestion was made to bring back in my older female players to talk and help the recruitment process, especially on picture day.
Girl only classes. I like this suggested idea as a once a month type event. This seems to also feed into the other idea of getting the groups and the friendships initiated so they they can draw from one another.
Along with this we have some (not many but a few) all girl tournaments in the area, that I could promote more heavily than I have done.
The manners of all the players and sportsmanship is something we work on weekly. As you would expect we have some emotions, but in general I feel we are OK in this. The repeated words in the club are “The pieces should be the only ones talking”. I wish that were so but it does keep emotions and taunting in check.
Thanks
MeterEngineer
VERY INTERESTING–for I was asked the exact same question by a chess parent at a club I run, and further,
how can we get more girls into chess tournaments?? Create another section?? Now both of my grown
children, both very involved with chess, are girls. For years this is a question that has truly vexed me.
I have tried running all girls local tournaments with very little success, as have several other organizers that
I know. Most of the girls who do play, realize that in playing, most of their opponents will be males. The
better females love the challenge, and for the most part, would prefer to play the best players, regardless
of sex. They feel that the “value” of female section only championships is diminished. I have no idea how
universal this feeling is among females, however.
Having directed all-girls events from the local to national level, I do see much value in such events. It is just
that, personally, at the local level, I have had very little success in interesting the fairer sex to attend such
events. So any of you with great ideas, I am all ears.
There are 34 events listed in MSA with “all girls” or “all-girls” in the title. That includes 9 nationals including the blitz side events (another had “girls national” without the word “all”), 2 CA, 2 CO, 1 FL, 7 IL, 1 MS, 8 NC, 11 NY, 5 OH, 1 VA.
A total of 232 have the word “girl”. You can look to see what number of players at an event would be considered a success, and then see if an organizer is willing to run one. 2010 (Columbus OH) and 2011 (Chicago IL) each set new records for the number of players in the national all girls (210 split as 16/15/41/38/55/45 and 224 split as 20/12/36/46/47/63) with the splits showing the attendance of the 18&U/16&U/14&U/12&U/10&U/8&U sections. I’m not sure how effective it would be having seperate girls and boys sections. Chicago saw 224 girls in the April National and then saw the October Polgar World with seperate sections having 33 girls and 105 boys (I don’t know if the Polgar name brought in more players than it pushed away).
You’re right! At our club, the ratio is only about 8.5 boys to every girl.
This has been my experience, too. It’s only a “problem” if people are convinced that the number of boys and girls participating should be the same, and the question is why they think that, given the widespread evidence to the contrary.