Does Gender Make Chess Skill?
By: Joonyoung Heo
In October 2020, Netflix released The Queen’s Gambit, the hit show about a fictional chess prodigy named Beth Harmon. Despite an acute drug addiction and an unsettling history in an orphanage, Harmon defeats many of the best male players of her time and quickly rises to global prominence. As of March 2021, the series has been exalted by critics and enjoyed by 62 million people. The show came at the perfect time. In the past few years, chess has skyrocketed in popularity, the pandemic acting as its greatest benefactor. Grandmasters and amateur streamers alike propagated the game to an international audience.
It’s no wonder, then, that The Queen’s Gambit has done so well. But, as with any blockbuster show, its success has not made it impervious to criticism. In particular, experienced chess players have pointed out what seems to be a major flaw––that Harmon, the young prodigy in question, is female. At the root of this critique and the creative liberty behind the show is the age-old question of gender in the sport: Are men better chess players than women?
Some of the best players in history have always given a one-sided answer. In a 1962 interview, American Grandmaster and eleventh World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer said that women are “terrible chess players” and that “they’re just not so smart.” In a 1987 interview, Russian Grandmaster Garry Kasparov, who was undisputed World Chess Champion for 23 years, said that “there is real chess and women’s chess.”
Such thinking is not a thing of the past, either. The vice president of the International Chess Federation (FIDE), British Grandmaster Nigel Short, claimed in 2015 that men are “hardwired” to be better chess players than women. Even a few female players have agreed to this sentiment. As recently as 2020, Indian Grandmaster Koneru Humpy said in an interview that men are the superior players, and women would just “have to accept it.”
However tempted we may be to dismiss these comments as baseless speculation, though, the numbers only support them. Compare, for instance, Norwegian Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, the current World Chess Champion and considered by many to be the greatest of all time, with Hungarian Grandmaster Judit Polgar, generally thought to be his counterpart as the strongest female player.
Carlsen’s peak FIDE rating (the most precise means of calculating chess skill) is 2882, while Polgar’s is 2735––a difference of 147 points. And keep in mind that the vast majority of female players don’t even come close to Polgar’s rating. In fact, the best of the best average around 2500. These statistics are not anomalous. In March 2021, only 1% of the top 100 players in the world were women. Across the board, male players have consistently performed better than the women, and often by a substantial margin.
Is it really the truth, then, that men are simply better chess players than women? Currently, yes. On average, it cannot be disputed that men have higher ratings than women. But this is not for the reason that Fischer, Kasparov, and many of their colleagues have put forward. The actual “why” of the matter is based not on some inherent chess genius that’s found more commonly in men, but on a series of arbitrary factors that have shaped the gender skew we see today.
Perhaps the most convincing argument lies in the sheer force of numbers. Throughout chess history, it has remained a constant that male players significantly outnumber female players. As of March 2021, only 15% of registered players in the United States Chess Federation (USCF) were women. In 2019, a mere 10.1% of the FIDE rating list (active players) was female. By the golden rule of probability, this means that men are far more likely to have a successful chess career than women simply because there are far more of them in the field.
Another critical factor is that men are more likely to be encouraged to play than women, who are often discouraged entirely. Professional female players encounter Fischers and Kasparovs every day. It isn’t hard to imagine why many of them drop out, and why those who stay are locked in a mindset of intrinsic inferiority as players. In fact, a 2007 study at the University of Padua found that female performance dropped when they were aware that they had a male opponent, while they played as well as the men when they (falsely) believed they had a female opponent.
Meanwhile, men get all the support they need, largely from the previous generation of greats. Carlsen himself was coached for some time by Kasparov. The best male players have been able to take advantage of the virtuous circle of skill and experience consolidated by skill and experience. Female players have not.
Finally, this imbalance is only reinforced by the practice of keeping the genders apart. Although most low-rated tournaments are open to all, the high-rated ones are often split into a men’s division and a women’s division. There’s the World Chess Championship, the FIDE World Cup, the US Chess Championship––and then there’s the Women’s World Chess Championship, the Women’s World Cup, the US Women’s Chess Championship.
Separating these tournaments by gender very rarely allows women to compete against the best male players and further establishes the notion that chess is a men’s sport, and that the women’s games are just a sideshow.
There is no chess talent intrinsic to the men that sets them apart from the women. Whatever some of the best players may say, there is not a single statistic that supports their claim. Women are not born to be worse at the game than men. It is only that a vicious circle of unfortunate factors works against them, making for poorer female performance and slipping motivation.
Critics of The Queen’s Gambit may have been correct that the show was imprudent in its choice of protagonist, but it is, as we have seen, not altogether impossible. If all the right pieces are placed on all the right squares, there is a Beth Harmon in every young woman with a chess board.
