Here's a thought-- as to why "prodigies" tend to be male... in all but a few areas:
Perhaps this is either a nurtured/innate difference in level of competitive/cooperative tendencies in the individual. Girls are frequently taught by well-meaning parents, extended family, and other caregivers from a rather young age that being "competitive" is not very feminine, at the very least. Those messages are pretty insidious and difficult to avoid. Girls learn quite young that being a cutthroat competitive personality is a route to social misery, at least within one's own gender. Some of that seems to be biologically driven.
There is no way to play chess "collaboratively" so that nobody loses. KWIM?
Males being more competitive is consistent with their being more focused or obsessive and more likely to convert innate ability into prodigy-level performance. As I know from experience, if winning at chess is very important to you, you are more likely to put in a lot of time studying and practicing.
Males are more focused?
LOL now there's a loaded statement. Before I bristle too much on behalf of my fellow females, let me say that I do recall reading something about the fact that females have more connections between the hemispheres of our brains, enabling us to do a variety of things such as verbalize our emotions and "multitask" (if that even exists - more likely we just switch rapidly from one task to another rather than executing multiple tasks simultaneously). Anyway. Males, meanwhile, have more of a propensity for specialization. Could that be misconstrued as focus? Because frankly, one could easily focus on multitasking. But now are we even talking about the same thing? (focus Vs specialization)
These are just generalized statements, of course... they don't necessarily apply to everyone and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to counter them.
