Statistics in chess

[Neill Cooper]

My wife (who is Director of Women's chess for ECF) and I tried to find some proxies for the male/female imbalance in sports, education and chess in other nations. For example the lowest proportion of female students in university subjects is 'technologies', 'engineering' and 'computer science'.

My daughter has just completed a computer science degree and less than 10% of the students were female. She is also involved in computer games competitions and says only 1 to 2% of the professional computer gamers are female.

[Alex Longson]

My wife (who is Director of Women's chess for ECF) and I tried to find some proxies for the male/female imbalance in sports, education and chess in other nations. For example the lowest proportion of female students in university subjects is 'technologies', 'engineering' and 'computer science'.

My daughter has just completed a computer science degree and less than 10% of the students were female. She is also involved in computer games competitions and says only 1 to 2% of the professional computer gamers are female.

Good for her - I believe it's an excellent field to be involved in.

PS I meant computer science - although it seems that gamers are also making quite a field for themselves now also!

[David Shepherd]

The following is a chart of A Level entry statistics http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j& ... Z7mb3TPu7Q

What is interesting is that the subjects that seem to link most closely to chess have lower female participation. Not only maths/physics, but possibly more interestingly music.

[Roger de Coverly]

Hi Roger - do you think we are just witnessing a natural phasing out of one form of organised chess and being replaced by other forms?

No I don't. Take a look at the tournament reports in 1970s and 1980s magazines and compare the number of participants then to the number of participants now. Many well known long established tournaments first started in the 1970s and are still playing in the same venue to a similar format. You could also look at how many players new to competitive chess enter tournaments. You can see it's hardly any, as almost everyone already has a grade.

I expect the numerous online services have closely guarded secrets as to the number of participants they have using their servers. The comparison there is whether they have increased their numbers over a time span of 10 or 20 years. The ECF in particular and the chess establishment in general has little influence and relevance to online players in England.

[MartinCarpenter]

One other data point which distinctly surprised me - there was a Reddit thread about boardgaming recently with several people expressing seemingly entirely genuine surprise about the idea there might even be a gender imbalance(!). Obviously they weren't aware of the history round this sort of stuff but still.

That is the sort of multi player German board gaming stuff, but its still awfully impressive if that has reached anything like 50/50. I think you'd find genuine statistics for that to be very hard to get as so much of the activity in that area is only semi formally organised.

[Brian Towers]

I have to admit I don't really understand the incomprehension surrounding gender differences / imbalances in games. It really boils down to two things:
1) People with a y chromosome have much higher testosterone levels
2) People with no y chromosome are much more sociable / socialized.

Chess is basically MMA for nerds where, perhaps, the first "M" stands for "mental" rather than "mixed".
On the testosterone levels thing two things stand out in my mind. One is the 1972 interview where Bobby Fischer said something which has been paraphrased as "I like crushing other men's egos" and the other is something very similar when Kasparov crushed Short a couple of years ago in a rapid/blitz match in St Louis. Check out the commentary and body language between about 95 and 100 minutes in of the youtube vidoe of the second day - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJJONV97p2o .

No wonder that people without a y chromosome don't do as well as those with.

When you compare games with different levels of social interaction you again see y chromosome linked correlations. In chess you are basically only allowed to say three things to your opponent - "j'adoube", "would you like a draw?" and "I resign". Not very sociable. I bet games where talking to the other players is an integral part of the game have much higher female participation rates than chess. I would also bet that even within a sport like bridge you will see different participation rates according to the different levels of acceptable social interaction. At the lower levels where you look at your partner and opponents, exchange glances, hold your cards with different numbers of fingers extended to show your heart holding, speak your bids, perhaps even kick your partner under the table expect higher female participation rates than at higher levels where partitions prevent you kicking partner and opponents, there is no speaking just the use of bidding cards. Are you even allowed to look at your partner? If so it can't be long before that too is banned. What sociable human being is going to want to play such a game? Only one with a y chromosome.

[IM Jack Rudd]

The gender mix at my board game club last night was 14 men to two women.

[MartinCarpenter]

That's more like I'd expect....

Bridge is definitely a fair bit like Brian thinks - very mixed gender participation at the not very serious level, very much more lopsided mixture in terms of the people who really take it 'seriously'.

[Paul Habershon]

Exactly so. Duplicate bridge clubs are much more gender balanced than chess clubs, perhaps even with a preponderance of women because they live longer. However, the top 50 in the bridge rolling grading list (NGS) currently has forty-nine men and one woman (of Eastern European origin - echo of chess here?).

[David Sedgwick]

I would also bet that even within a sport like bridge you will see different participation rates according to the different levels of acceptable social interaction. At the lower levels where you look at your partner and opponents, exchange glances, hold your cards with different numbers of fingers extended to show your heart holding, speak your bids, perhaps even kick your partner under the table expect higher female participation rates than at higher levels where partitions prevent you kicking partner and opponents, there is no speaking just the use of bidding cards. Are you even allowed to look at your partner? If so it can't be long before that too is banned. What sociable human being is going to want to play such a game? Only one with a y chromosome.

So women are more attracted to the lower levels of bridge because they can cheat with impunity.

Further words fail me.

[NickFaulks]

At the lower levels where you look at your partner and opponents, exchange glances, hold your cards with different numbers of fingers extended to show your heart holding, speak your bids, perhaps even kick your partner under the table expect higher female participation rates than at higher levels

Is this really a fair representation of club bridge?

[David Sedgwick]

At the lower levels where you look at your partner and opponents, exchange glances, hold your cards with different numbers of fingers extended to show your heart holding, speak your bids, perhaps even kick your partner under the table expect higher female participation rates than at higher levels

Is this really a fair representation of club bridge?

No, of course not.

However, there are a fair number of players who don't really understand concepts like unauthorised information. In effect they are breaking the Laws unintentionally.

[Michael Farthing]

I do not believe there is a single bridge player in the world who would hold up three fingers to single to an opponent a heart's holding without knowing that they were thereby cheating. Not even Brian Eley (he would do it - but he would know he was cheating).

[Brian Towers]

I would also bet that even within a sport like bridge you will see different participation rates according to the different levels of acceptable social interaction. At the lower levels where you look at your partner and opponents, exchange glances, hold your cards with different numbers of fingers extended to show your heart holding, speak your bids, perhaps even kick your partner under the table expect higher female participation rates than at higher levels where partitions prevent you kicking partner and opponents, there is no speaking just the use of bidding cards. Are you even allowed to look at your partner? If so it can't be long before that too is banned. What sociable human being is going to want to play such a game? Only one with a y chromosome.

So women are more attracted to the lower levels of chess because they can cheat with impunity.

Further words fail me.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! David! Where to start?

OK, first off, would you like to borrow my glasses? In the part you quote of my words the word "chess" does not appear. The word "bridge" does. It is all about bridge, not chess.

Secondly, look up the phrase "strawman argument". My argument is not that women are attracted by the opportunity of cheating but that of increased social interaction.

Third, I suspect you may have some slight knowledge of bridge but either your knowledge of its history is scanty or you just couldn't pause for the two seconds necessary to put your brain into gear and consider the irony in my allusions to incidents of cheating.

Let's have a look at them, shall we?

hold your cards with different numbers of fingers extended to show your heart holding.

I wonder if this could possibly be an allusion to the events of the 1965 Bermuda Bowl where Terence Reese and Boris Shapiro were accused of doing exactly that?

perhaps even kick your partner under the table

Partitions are now placed under the tables at international competitions specifically to prevent cheating by footsy. It wasn't always so. Which event sparked this change? Well, it was the accusations against Gianfranco Facchini and Sergio Zucchelli in the 1975 Bermuda Bowl.

Here's the ironical part, Dave. They were all men! Not a woman in sight. And all this alleged cheating is happening at the highest levels of bridge.

[Adam Raoof]

I think that using the ECF membership statistics does not give you a very accurate portrait of chess being played in England.