On Thu, 4 May 2006, ravi said:
> It doesn't seem to add much to reiterate that women's presence in chess
> has been minimal, historically. Why that is so, is an interesting
> question, for which we have some answers. That Judit Polgar can hold her
> own against top ranked men demonstrates that at least today, there is no
> inherent [ability based] reason for this under-representation. I think the
> parsimonious explanation suffices.
There are actually two pretty clear sociological reasons why women have done so badly in chess which the career of the Polgars did a lot to expose. One is that top flight chess players are, on average, the most antediluvianally sexist bastards you've ever seen. Marines are better. This was something I never expected, and I have no idea where it comes from, but it's undeniable. It's seems so counterintuitive. I mean, what less manly sport is there ....Oh. Maybe that's where it comes from :o)
Just as one example among many: I went to a tournament 20 years at the then Penta Hotel in New York when Judit was 10, Sophia was 12 and Zsuzsa was 18. Hungarian was almost the lingua franca at that tournament, and I was with a Hungarian friend who knew all the players because he'd gone to school with Gyula Sax, so we got to chat with him, Portisch, the Polgars, etc. In the middle of the floor, roped off, were the GM games. It was early in the tournament, so people losing or winning was uneventful. But then slowly word got out that Zsuzsa was beating Nick DeFirmian and the GMs starting gathering like vultures along the edge of the cordon. They weren't talking, but you could hear them smiling and silently giggling and mocking. Finally DeFirmian jumped up yelling out loud and ran out the room. He just couldn't take it anymore. Being beaten by any man in the world, even one 500 points below him, wouldn't have caused this. It was literally unbearable for him.
So that's the first point: this is a very hostile work environment. It is no mystery why historically there weren't many women attracted to it. You'd have to have been nuts.
But then we come to the second part, which flows from the first but is much more causally important: once you reach the GM level, the only way to get higher, to get into the ring of inner contenders -- and this was esp. true back in the 80s when the Polgars were coming on the scene, and chess computers were still in their infancy -- is to analyze with other top GMs. No book can teach you anything at that point. It's going over the games afterwards with the other top GMs and and discussing and arguing that teaches you things you don't know.
And that's a very exclusive club. And women were simply not let in it. And it was very clear when Zsuzsa was 18 that she was being frozen out. It was clear to Sax, who was one of Hungary's top 5 players. He said he sometimes analyzed with her and got flack for it. But there was no way she was admitted to the regular sesssions that went on informally every week after every tourament. She was basically being frozen out of upper GM school. She was hitting the ceiling at the moment when she should be making her greatest leap. You could just see her shoulders sagging under it.
Judit was always made of tougher stuff. When she was 10 she kept a little toy lion next to the table. And she always went for the advantage. When her opponent, who had white, didn't show up by the 7:30pm start time, she said to her mother they should start his clock. Which you have the right to do, but which is really very prickish and rarely done. And her mother, a very gracious woman, said the obvious, which Judit knew, but then she whined self-righteously, But what about my bedtime?! And this was against a guy with a lower rating.
And not only was Judit tougher, but the world changed appreciably as she got older. The world already changed at the lower ranks to let Zsuzsa into boys' tournaments -- that took a revolution in itself in Hungary. It took legal pleadings. And then Judit was the first woman in history to be treated as a man at the upper level after playing the same route as boy when she was young.
So IMHO, the problem here is solved so thoroughly at the intake level that there's no reason to even entertain other hypotheses until we get new data. These three women were basically the first in history to get the training and competition that men got. And Judit really was the first in history to be allowed into the inner sanctum. And based on that incredibly tiny sample, for one of them to be a world contender -- higher than most of the guys whose games you follow in the paper -- is statistically incredible. And there's nothing in their past to suggest any genetic reason for this. Dad's a kind hearted patzer. He simply fought for them to have the rights of men. And it was a long fight, and he eventually won.
So to the extent that the Polgars can be used as evidence, they suggest to me that in an alternative universe where 10s of thousands of women had been treated equally, there'd be a lot of them in the top ranks.
And when top chess players give you their considered opinion that women don't have what it takes, remember -- these aren't social scientists giving you their considered opinion after years of consideration. These are men with the maturity of six year boys -- and just as reliable when it comes to opinions on which gender is best.
Michael