Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Stereotype threat: girls and chess

Space_Cadet, this is exactly why we just weren't that concerned when DD lost interest in chess after just a few months of intense interest.
Could she be good? I think so, yes-- she has great strategic/spatial ability and she's at least EG, so yes.

But she hates winning a zero-sum-game very slightly more than she hates losing one, generally speaking, unless there is some outside factor that makes her "win" mean something larger.

Intimidation isn't a factor for her-- she took a great deal of joy in team LEGO competitions, after all, when she was the only girl, and the youngest in the room as well. It's the one-on-one, win-lose aspect that she doesn't like.

Honestly, given her perfectionistic streak, we haven't felt that chess would be all that good for her, either-- because it reinforces the precise aspects of her binary world-view that MOST need remediation. (In most instances, not coming in "first" place still means success, not failure.)

Why would you automatically reject this idea? Here is one plausible explanation for it.

* Spatial ability is an important part of chess
* Boys have an higher standard deviation of spatial ability than girls.
* If the mean of boys and girls spatial ability is the same, then both extremes would be dominated by boys. The boys with high spatial ability would typically dominate girls with high spatial ability when it comes to chess.

There are of course exceptions. I know an extremely talented young girl player, who routinely dominates skilled boys that are a few years older.

The full study is not publicly available, so I am commenting on the write-up.

Maybe, relative to boys, they do. Girls and boys are more different at age 15 than 5, and the greater differential in running speed at age 15 is not due primarily to socialization. I think it is plausible that puberty increases intellectual differences between the sexes.


I can be strategically agnostic, replying "I don't know for sure" if she ever asks why most of the best players are male.


Couldn't avoiding an activity that you would otherwise enjoy because there are too many boys (or girls) doing it be considered sexist? Our local chess club is majority Chinese, with some Indians and fewer whites (most of whom have Russian parents). If someone avoids the chess club because they don't like the ethnic mix, that's their problem, not the club's.

I'm skeptical that your premises are correct. But even assuming they are, for argument's sake, how does a characteristic about the extreme tails of the distribution of "ability" (arguably >3sd) translate into a meaningful comment about a gender split in chess participation closer the mean, say +1-3sd, where most players fall? You can't meaningfully infer the expected performance of the gender distribution from the tails.

Again, you're applying a false analogy and conflating physical differences with cognitive ones. Males are, on average, taller, carry more muscle mass, and have higher VO2max, among other population physical traits, that enable greater running speed than females. What gender-linked morphology is it that you purport makes males superior to females in chess on a population, not individual, basis? I'd like to see some studies to back up your premises which, though repeated in each of your replies, remain unsubstantiated.

Females are also underrepresented in men's public washrooms. Hint: the causality isn't linked to neurological gender differences.

Actually, it is the club's problem.

The club's goal is to maximize the performance of its constituent members, with minimal input (instruction). If the club has a demographic or ethnographic mix that systematically statistically underrepresents a major group at certain levels (in this case, females), it is in the club's best interest to actively encourage the participation of underrepresented groups. Otherwise, it's truncating the distribution of players it draws from, which limits the expected probability that the average inductee is a high-ability player. The result is, on average, a lower ability team that has less exposure to competing with high ability players, which is to the detriment of everyone involved.

Actively encouraging underrepresented groups' participation is exactly what the highest performing F100 companies do to recruit a workforce of diverse backgrounds and with the best capabilities. If it works for Goldman and Pfizer, why not Main Street School Chess Club? Or, is the motive of the club twofold: maximum performance within a given demographic? Because, to me, it sounds like the latter the way you portray it, Bostonian.

By HR law in most of the industrialized west, if an underrepresented group at a firm is not explicitly encouraged to apply for a given position, discrimination is deemed present because the demographically biased environment creates a hostile climate for the underrepresented applicant. So no, it isn't sexist for a little girl to shy away from a predominantly male chess club, or a little boy to avoid a dance troupe, if the prevailing climate is exclusionary to their demographic group. If countries rightly protect adults from that sort of xenophobic discrimination, why should children be subjected to the same injurious injustice just because their social opportunity set has a less formal legal and organizational structure?!

Sexisim is defined as unfair treatment of someone based on sex. I don't think that not joining the chess club fits this definition.

I can see both sides of this debate. On the one hand, I suspect that Bostonian is suspicious of a condition called stereotype threat. Honestly, I am too. I've seen some deeply, deeply bogus studies on the subject. Both studies I just cited were published in Science! These and other papers I've read are pseudoscience, yet are touted in such high places, they make me dubious about the field as a whole.

Which isn't to say that sexism doesn't exist. Of course it does. Women haven't succeeded historically in countless areas for the simple reason that they weren't allowed to. My husband's mother wanted to be a fighter pilot, but it wasn't allowed. My aunt kept her job after she had kids (1950s) and suffered all kinds of abuse for being a "working wife." I mean, women weren't even allowed to vote until less than 100 years ago. And then there are African-Americans (and Hispanics), who are STILL having trouble casting a ballot. This is not "stereotype threat." This is a locked door.

People have earnestly debated whether or not the country is ready for a female (or African-American) president. Etc. The problem isn't necessarily that women or members of a variety of ethnic groups are less capable. It's that other people either see them that way or (IMO) don't want to have more people to compete with. Or...maybe a lot of them can't handle the idea that people they thought were inferior to them...aren't. And a lot of these individuals either make decisions or have a high-profile soapbox to shout from.

So I can be as tough as nails and incredibly confident in my abilities, but that won't be worth a nickel if the people who run the male-dominated club don't want me around because I'm a girl. Oh, they may not say so directly, but I'll get the message when they don't look at me when they're talking and don't acknowledge what I say.

No, all men aren't like that. But a lot are.

Ok, which premise do you doubt?

Do you doubt that there is a difference in spatial ability between boys and girls? My understanding is that spatial ability is a reason why the strongest boys still do better in math than the strongest girls, even though girls are generally doing better in school than boys these days.

Do you doubt that spatial ability is important? My son wouldn't use the term spatial ability, but he would tell you that his ability to look 8-9 moves into a position helps him win a lot of games.

For the final part, consider the reason that Malcom Gladwell gave as to why a disproportionate number of professional soccer players are born in January, February and March in his book Outliers. His explanation was that because these were the oldest kids in their class, they were more slightly more talented than the others. They received more coaching over time, which continually increased their skill levels over their slightly less capable players. The less skilled players dropped out as competition increased, leaving a disproportionate number of players born in the first three months of the year.

Re girls and math, I believe we've been through this before--but as a refresher course, and from memory (so I may be off slightly), girls now outperform boys, on average, on standardized math tests in elementary schools. There has also been a MASSIVE improvement in their performance on the SAT and on other measures with higher ceilings over the last 30 years--truly massive. The number of women majoring in math has skyrocketed as well.

On measures that assess the really high ends of math performance, I believe boys used to outscore girls 20 to 1, but now it is 4 to 1, and in some countries and populations, 2 to 1. International studies show that the # of girls who compete in extremely elite math competitions varies wildly by country and in fact, appears to correlate somewhat with the situation for women in that country.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't completely reject the possibility that boys and girls (men and women) have some innate differences in verbal and spatial abilities, but we have NO ABILITY to know what those differences are yet due to entrenched sexism. There is NO REASON to assume that we have suddenly, just NOW, reached the point where sexism doesn't matter and all of that has fallen away to show us true natural abilities. People thought that in the '80s, when boys were outscoring girls 20 to 1. Please.

Anyway...regarding chess. As aquinas has eloquently stated, the differences in the tails in no way explain the gross inequities in mass representation at chess clubs and competitions.

And for an example in my own life, my father taught both of my brothers to play chess, but not me. Now, maybe he suspected I would be bad at it (I am). But while one of my brothers likes the game, the other is just as incompetent and uninterested as I am (he's a words person, like me).

Getting along with peers is certainly important. And I'm not especially competitive myself. But I don't think I would say this is "no big deal." In a world where men are still the politicians, the CEOs, etc, I think we need more women who are motivated to win and to perform when intimidated. It should not be "unfeminine" or seem embarrassing (as I think it sometimes does to my DD) to dominate at the chessboard.

One thing about chess is different than almost all other games that children play: there is absolutely no luck involved. (Well, okay...there is whether you get white or black, and at a tournament, the pairings involve a bit of luck.) If you win, you win on skill. And you must be aggressive. I agree that this can be hard for girls, who are socialized not to behave this way. I disagree that it is not a valuable skill. It's certainly not THE ONLY valuable skill.

I do, for the reasons ultramarina has elucidated. It's the classic problem of inferring ability from outcomes without adequately cotrolling for confounding factors. The studies that attempt to tease out gender differences in ability don't control for socialization or prevailing gender norms, for example. To see such a profound change in the gender ratio over time suggests I'm correct that the causal factors haven't been properly modelled yet in the literature.

So do I believe studies have found a gender difference in spatial skills? Sure. Do I think the studies have actually measured what they purport to measure, in a ceteris paribus way, with a level of statistically significant precision? Absolutely not. I would be very hesitant to make such sweeping generalizations on such a shaky empirical basis.

It's reasonable to think spatial ability is important to chess performance. However, your argument logically relies on spatial skills being the prime determinant of ability. I don't think that assumption is reasonable. It sounds like you have one piece of data and are trying to fit the argument to the data.


It could be rational that clubs will disproportionately apportion resources to the highest ability players.

I have to question the underlying goal of chess clubs, though. Is it to nurture talent at the very top, or to maximize performance across all members? I would think some combination of the two has the most value for both the highest ability players and society.

For the reasons I discussed above, I think chess clubs' reaction function is off. That is, I think they've mis-calibrated their target (boys, at the exclusion of girls) and are optimizing over the wrong set.

There is a benefit to society at large, I think, to having children accustomed to thinking strategically. Why game theoretic thinking isn't taught in school is beyond me. But then, I have a graduate degree in game theory.