I’ve noticed that introverted guys have no trouble keeping to themselves at chess tournaments. The same isn’t true of women chess players. I haven’t seen any behavior that I’d call OBJECTIONABLE, but a lot of GUYS seem uncomfortable with ANY social interaction and MANAGE TO AVOID IT. I’d say women chess players have a lot more trouble managing that.
This is hardly a scientific conclusion, just the way things look to me. YMMV
I didn’t say that the girl only tournaments were bad. I said that they were discriminating against boys. With all the tournaments available to players, the girls have more opportunities now than the boys to play tournament chess.
I think we do need to seperate the tournaments designed for younger people than those designed for adult inclusion.
I do agree that in the formative years, the girls may want their own venue to play tournament chess. At that same age, the boys also deserve their own venue with the opportunity to not have girls.
There are girl only schools and boy only schools. The girls have stated that without boys in the classroom they can better study without any distractions of having boys in the class. It can be argued that boy only schools also provide a more distraction free school opportunity.
If you feel the need to have girl only tournaments for whatever reason, then I say the boys deserve the same opportunities provided to them.
In the adult situation I personally see no need whatsoever to seperate the sexes in tournaments, period.
Flying fighter jets is a typical activity that has been male dominated. Evidence and studies show that women are actually just as good and sometimes better at the task.
There is no reason why a women could not be in good physical shape to play competitive chess. Yes, the elite do talk about the physical aspect of top level chess. The thing I note is that their level of physical endurance is not as high as a professional athlete. A perfect example is Gata Kamsky who would run no more than 3 miles to stay in shape when he was vying for the world title. As a runner, I can tell you that 3 miles of running is really not that much to deliver top physical shape. In fact a person really needs to run at least twice that much, three times a week, to get in minimal shape. Understand that I mean only running as the activity to get in shape.
Another example of this is Boris Spassky who would play tennis to stay in shape for chess. Once again, not the hardest physical activity to get in shape. I know of many women that can easily attain this level of physical stamina and endurance and more.
With all that, I agree with Beatriz that the women should be totally in the fray with the men as regards to chess and titles.
This is false. There are plenty of women’s bridge events. For example, at “http://www.acbl.org/play/nabcPlus.html” is the schedule of ACBL national events at the three-times-a-year North American Bridge Championships.
Bridge events are gender-divided into “Open” (no restriction), “Women’s” (women-only) and “mixed” (partnerships must consist of one man and one woman).
Ron,
You keep making sweeping generalizations without evidence to back them up. I’m NOT saying that men have an advantage over women because of physical condition. I AM saying that your statement to the contrary is made without evidence to support it. In fact, I wonder if women wouldn’t have a big advantage over men at senior events (on average), but I won’t CLAIM that to be true since I have no evidence.
If you feel the need to organize a boys-only scholastic event, go right ahead. I don’t think you’ll find much support.
Never mind…
It is obvious that you feel I need to show evidence where you do not.
I see no reason to discuss this further witn those rules set.
I try to qualify what I’m saying as opinion or personal observation if I don’t have any hard facts to back up what I’ve said. If I’ve messed up, point it out to me and I’ll retract it.
In this discussion, we’ve not only seen a lot of conjecture and opinion presented as facts, we’ve seen a lot of outright false statements. For example: statements about women-only Bridge competitions and women-only races.
So I agree with Ron on one thing, I’m not willing to discuss this by HIS rules. Hopefully we can continue to have productive discussions on subjects that are less emotionally charged. BTW Ron, do you have a child that plays chess? I’ve discussed my daughter’s playing in the past, and perhaps I’m somewhat biased on this subject.
Well yeah one or two people thought there were not such competitions but in fact there are, the correct fact was presented, and we moved on all better informed. They weren’t central points. You yourself said that you weren’t trying to prove anything about chess with your example of powder-puff races; that it was just peripheral. I think the discussion has been mostly on-point with the few fouls well distributed among the players.
I don’t believe he’s laid down any – what do you have in mind, tanstaafl?
This can be a PC hot button but I think we have shown we can discuss it.
So you don’t mind having boy-only tournaments but the issue would be sponsorship. I agree, and I applaud Susan Polgar for sponsoring her girls-only tournament. I’m not in the chess business and my kids are more interested in cars and music these days; their interest in chess is that they must wait for me to finish playing internet chess so they can get on the computer. So I’ll wait for someone else to sponsor boys-only events, then applaud them just the same.
As I’ve said above, if the USCF (a large sponsor of chess tournaments and the provider of this discussion board) is sponsoring single-sex tournaments it should have both kinds at once. I hope that other large sponsors (CCA, etc.) will follow that policy as well.
Despite tanstaafl and Ron’s relatively minor disagreement, I’ve found most of the posts in this thread to be fairly well reasoned. It’s not surprising that it’s been laden with opinion. There aren’t a whole lot of studies on the subject, so to expect evidence is rather unrealistic. This isn’t a court of law.
It could be argued that having any event not open to all is inherently discriminatory. Such a view seems too narrow to have practical application, since the d-word is emotionally charged. I haven’t seen anyone propose a compelling reason why girls tournaments are bad absent the assertion that they are discriminatory and thus automatically unacceptable. I may be misinterpreting him, but it seems like Ron is OK with girls only tournaments but not with women only tournaments.
I’m not convinced there are enough boys around who aren’t playing chess because they don’t want to play girls to justify the need for boys only tournaments. In today’s environment such an event would be interpreted as “keep the girls out”, while I don’t think a girls only event would have the same connotation. Just my opinion.
BTW, I have no chess playing children and thus have no particular vested interest in this issue. Personally, I think girls only or womens only events do absolutely no harm to anyone and offer potential to increase female participation in the long run. Thus I support them whole-heartedly.
I agree with this post completely.
Defining something discriminatory does not infer that it is a bad thing. It is important to have discriminating taste in life.
Thank you for the observation of evidence versus lack of it.
I don’t know what “today’s environment” means, maybe it means different things to different people, or what people think that other people think, or whatever. All I know is what I think, and it’s that a single sex tournament keeps out the other sex, so they should come in pairs if at all possible.
Actually a girls-only tournament keeps out a lot of boys while a boys-only tournament keeps out a smaller number of girls. (Open tournaments anyway; the Polgar is about one participant per state so the above logic doesn’t apply.) But if a boys-only tournament is held, I think that there should also be a girls-only tournament – and vice versa – if a big sponsor (most especially the USCF) is putting on the events.
Given the current climate, there is a need for girls-only chess events. At these events the girls connect with each other across school and team lines. They maintain these connections when they hit the middle grades, and each of them is the only girl left on their school team. I’ve seen it happen at mixed events: Girls on different teams will hang out each other rather than the boys on their own teams.
Discrimination? If there truly is a need or market for boys-only tournaments, then I’m sure someone will step forward to organize them. My daughter and I will not feel discriminated against; there are more than enough opportunities for her to play rated chess. It is not a question of opportunities to play rated scholastics, it’s a question of what kinds of rated scholastics the players want to attend.
Girls don’t want to be segregated from boys all the time. They just want to go off and do chess as a group of girls once in a while. I could see that boys might want to do that, too.
I’ve seen girls get intimidated by a group of boys at scholastic tournaments on at least two occasions. The issue here is NOT the inherent meanness of one gender. The issue is numbers. In both instances it was a group of boy comrades rather unintentionally ganging up on a girl.
We have got to get the numbers of girls in scholastics up high enough that it’s viable for a girl to stay in the game.
I’ll say it again: numbers matter. The one study I’ve gotten my hands on showed that girls’ ratings are roughly the same as boys’ in geographic areas where boys and girls participate in chess in equal numbers. Given the right environment and a peer group, girls apparently can do chess just fine.
It would be nice if girls and boys participated in chess in equal numbers across all age groups and regions, but that ain’t the way it is right now. So, let’s stop worrying about possible physical, intellectual or emotional differences in male and female approaches to chess. Let’s instead deal with what we know: there are fewer girls than boys in the game, and girls leave the game because of this.
Among active players with an established rating, the highest percentages of female players is among those who are 10 or younger, around 15%.
After age 10 the percentages drop off. By age 20 only 5% of the players are female.
A very lively discussion on women’s chess that I actually havent been involved with. I guess I’ve been away from the forums for awhile. 
The NY State High School Championship was tie between and girl and a boy, the girl won on tie breaks. We gave her the choice of which tournament she wanted to play in, and she opted to take the Polgar slot. That was totally her choice, and it allowed the co-champion to take the Denker spot.
A few observations from a woman’s point of view.
I’ve been playing in tournaments since 1972, and I have seen an increase of women playing over the years, and not just at the scholastic level. I also seen the ratings of the Top 50 go up signicantly. When I joined in 1972 they did Top 25 lists and the the lowest rated women on that list was mid 1500s. Currently I barely manage to make the Top 100 at 1700. So there has been inprovements in terms of participation and playing strength.
One poster spoke of needing boys only tournaments for those boys who are afraid to play girls. I have to laugh when I think about that prospect. I recall my freshman year in college playing a junior high aged boy whose rating was around 50 - 100 points higher then mine. I won, and he never played tournament chess again. His reason was because he lost to a girl.
At the time I ate it up because I took glee in that a male would be crushed by losing to a mere female. I don’t know if he ever resumed playing tournament chess, but my guess would be that if losing to me hadn’t driven him out, something else down the road would have. Though I must admit as a middle aged female triathlete I still got my jollies beating males, especially ones younger then me.
Personally I think anyone who quits playing a sport or game because he was beaten by a member of the opposite sex, someone younger, or older then himself has more issues then could possibly be taken care of by having an event limited people of his own sex or age. I’ve been beaten by too many little kids with single digit ages to worry about wanting to play in only senior events.
I’ve always had mixed feelings about women’s/girls events. Over the years I’ve had many heated discussions with women about this very topic. It’s been a divisive topic in the US Open women’s workshops and on the women’s committee. On the one hand it does seem to send the message that females aren’t capable of competing on the same level as men, on the other hand there are plenty of other chess competitions based on age, grade, handicap, etc.
I have always enjoyed women’s tournaments for the social aspect, and also the chance to play women that I might not get a chance to play in other tournaments. If I’m playing in a 200 player section and there are 10 women in that section there’s a good chance I won’t play any of them. Put those same 10 women in 20 player women’s tournament and it’s highly likely I’m going to get to play a number of them.
I thought the all girls championships in Chicago in March was a wonderful event. It was nice seeing so many girls playing hard fought chess, and participating in the blitz and bughouse events. I haven’t been to any of the various girls events that Susan has organized, but I imagine there is a similar atmosphere. Personally I wish they would add an 21+ section because I think it’s good for young girls to see that adult women continue to play. It would give both the adults and junior players a chance to interact more, and perhaps help forge some mentoring relationships between young and old.
Prefatory remarks, to establish a context…
When I was 11?, I went a very respectable 2-3 in the Susquehanna Valley Open (just before the Fischer boom, this was the only tnmt of the year near my PA hometown)–won incidentally by young Vincent Livermore, the real-life “Vinnie” of Searching for Bobby Fischer fame. When I was 12, I hoped to do better…and went 0-3 on Day One. I cried on my pillow, then lost two more games on Sunday. Fischer reportedly cried on at least one occasion at the 1959 Candidates, and in the past year or two, I’ve seen some distraught young boys in need of post-mortem consolation…
Having said that…
One thing that struck me about the KCF Chicago event: I’ve never seen SO MANY young girls run out of the room crying after losing a chess game. And that this might be a true difference between boys and girls: we all feel the same emotions, but girls are a bit more open with them. (And further: that at a certain age, revealing these emotions in competitions with boys might be awkward.)
I think that part of the socialization of competitive chess–for boys and girls both–has to be teaching certain (seemingly contradictory) ideas:
That when one achieves a certain level, one often has to lose MANY MANY games before one can reach the next level.
That when one loses, one has NOTHING TO BE ASHAMED OF as long as one is playing the best one possibly can.
That winning always feels great, and losing always, er, stinks.
One does not need to adopt the public persona of a McEnroe or a Fischer in order to become a top-level player. Perhaps one virtue of a girls-only event is that it creates a supportive environment for girls to risk failure, necessary in order to achieve future success.
P.S. Apparently this very topic is discussed in a recent number of Nature:
Do you think she chose for the right reasons or those that Tom Martinak was concerned about in starting this thread?
And a few comments from a man’s …
But mainly (entirely?) it’s because of the participation of female immigrants from Russia and environs. I remember when Diane Savereide was the US Women’s champ, she was the last home-grown one I believe.
I’m sure this came across harsher in writing than you intended. I’ll just say that nobody enjoys being objectified in this sense, as the representative of maleness to be defeated to decrease his status relative to the female. The object of bashing, if you will. The fragility of the loser’s ego vs. the glee of the victor is on top of that. I don’t know how well you are able to hide all this and thereby act considerately during and after a game that you win.
I’m glad that I was able to win (even against Diane, in 1980 or 81) and not take my chances with this happening to me. I did get some particular pleasure from that win, but that was mainly because as a female, she had had so many special opportunities from the USCF and FIDE that I could not dream of getting.
I’m glad you qualified that as a personal rather than professional opinion. I wonder if any psychiatrist or psychologist would agree.
I would venture that few or none of these little kids exhibit issues around getting jollies by beating grown women.
The existence of special female titles and championships – moreso than separate tournament sections in run-of-the-mill events – tells me that women are less capable of competing or don’t have to compete as hard. This is separate from any question of discrimination, i.e. whether men have enough other events to enter. But I know that some women are capable of high level chess and just as for men, their rating is a good indicator of it. Nobody of either gender does well in chess without unusually strong skills and self confidence of the right type.
As I said in my first post of the thread, I rarely see women easily chatting with others they do not already know in real life. I’m glad that this common-interest activity is an exception. But I think boys might also feel a bit more camaraderie in some circumstances, if they were separate from the already-identified issues around gender and chess. I think that my high school chess team (man, we were tough!) was more cohesive and fun because it was all boys.
Thanks,
David
Hey Bill do you remember me from Chicago circa 1978? We hung out that summer when I had a summer job there. How are you??
Your story reminds me of when I went got 2 1/2 in the first 3 rounds of a World Open (beat Mike Wilder in round 1 but he was only in the low 2200’s back then – and I was an A player) – even Goichberg was impressed with my norm possibilities – then lost the next 3 or so games and withdrew in surrender, the only time I ever withdrew from a tournament.
Amen to the part about losing! If you can’t take a loss and learn from it consistently, working through the pain, you’ll never know much.
On the gender topic, I think that single-sex tournaments are helpful for both genders. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. But on the other hand quoting a favorite author:
Alexey Root (then Rudolph) is a home grown US Women’s Champion post Sevareide.
not to mention our web editor, 2x
artichoke, did we briefly go to IHTFP together? If you are who I think you are, you won a board prize for IHTFP B team precisely because I blew so many won games on Board One. (McAlpin, circa Dec 1976)