Women are moving aggressively, too
Saturday, January 30, 2010 2:55 AM
By SHELBY LYMAN
A 69-country study of 500,000 boys and girls ages 14 to 16 found insignificant gender differences in math performance, Scientific American magazine recently reported.
The survey concluded that differences resulted from social rather than innate factors.
Considering the parallel between math and chess abilities, the findings are a clarion call to action for the chess community.
In recent decades, women have played top-flight chess with increasing success, belying the preconceptions of many skeptics. As with mathematics, little in their play suggests innate gender differences. Women play as aggressively as their male counterparts.
The games of Judit Polgar, ranked among the world’s top 10 players for years, offer strong evidence. Her vigorous, creative attacking style terrorizes male and female opponents alike.
Source: Columbus Dispatch
i call BS
lol
Social perceptions, norms and mores affect how female chessplayers play. When gender roles are controlled for, this study shows that there was no difference in relative chessplaying ability in similarly rated male and female players.
Checkmate? The role of gender stereotypes in the ultimate
intellectual sport
ANNE MAASS*, CLAUDIO D’ETTOLE
AND MARA CADINU
University of Padova, Italy
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/114262136/PDFSTART?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
Thanks Susan now i dont have to waste time looking up the mathematical difference! I guess the case is closed but men still believe they stronger than women in chess, but UM gunna take care of them. Vishy funny though after Nc4 he took the PolgarPass.
Ok, I cant’ comment on the study, but the idea that female players’ “aggressiveness” is a sign of strength is garbage.
Female chessplayers have always played aggressive, attack the king chess, in my experience. The problem is that they are just weak.
It’s similar to the mistake of thinking that the higher percentage of wins among top female players is means something positive. No it doesnt—lowered rated players have fewer draws.
If there are social factors, the most prominent one would probably be that women don’t devote themselves to chess as seriously as men.
That’s something I read from a woman GM on here a while back.
If you want a gender comparison of chess strength, study players in Georgia. There are lots of women players there, and they just don’t approach the level of the top men.
I’m a mathematician. Generally speaking, my experience is that men are better at geometric/spatial reasoning than women, while women are sometimes much better at the algebra side of math.
Women and men are different, including in their brains.
Chess requires very specialized mental skills which are far from any kind of general intelligence.
If men are better on average than men, it doesn’t mean much, and it doesn’t mean that some woman can’t be the top player.
By the way, there’s only one Polgar that Korchnoi respected for her playing, and it wasn’t Judit or Sofia.
He respected Susan more precisely because her chess transcended the attack the king brilliance of Judit, displaying more positional understanding.
About the math skills:
I don’t know how performance in lower level math courses predicts success at advanced levels.
From my experience, it would definitely be wrong to say that a person who excels at algebra will be good at calculus. To be sure, algebra skills are essential for calculus courses; the problem is that understanding the concepts of limit, derivative and integral are a huge leap beyond the math that goes before. Understanding calculus is probably the biggest cognitive jump which college students have to make, with the possible exception of some physics courses.
I love it when women play aggressively on me!
Lionel, men are certainly stronger than women in chess. E.g., there is only one woman among the top 150 players in the world (and she seems semi-retired from competitive chess now). There is some question about why that is true:
1. spatial/mathematical ability is superior in men (not a likely factor);
2. girls don’t play as much (certainly a major factor);
3. chess is a violent, highly competitive game that tends to not be as attractive to girls as to boys (an important factor that is also related to #2 above).
Well you have a point anon with the “old chess” men have been winning more competitions,but with the “new chess” we can see the top guys struggling and making “new errors” that wasnt present before. Now they pretending like they dont know why, funny guys though!
La Griffe du Lion has an excellent piece demonstrating a gap in male-female mathematical ability by using his method of thresholds analysis on Fielding prize winners.
I find the title an interesting juxtaposition of “social” and “innate”, considering that recent research proves females have an innate 1 standard deviation advantage in social awareness. Researchers looked at facial microexpression recognition, verbal emotion recognition, and acting ability.
Details in these two posts:
http://koanic.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/3/
http://koanic.wordpress.com/2010/06/26/science-proves-what-schwarzennegger-knew-men-should-pose-more-and-talk-less/
My guesses on this study’s flaws:
1. Focusing on too early age bracket (low probability)
2. Using a low difficulty threshold to create the statistical artifact of a shrinking gap (medium probability)
3. Dishonestly “controlling” for gender roles to achieve the desired result (high probability).
Keep up the bad work.
-Koanic