December 17, 2014 • 40 mins
Chess, one of history's oldest games, is considered a man's game -- but why? Cristen and Caroline examine how the queen piece revolutionized chess and subsequently kicked women players out of the sport.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told you. From how Supports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, and today we are doing a podcast
all about chess, which I have a feeling sounds like
it has the potential to be the most boring podcast
(00:25):
in the world, as though we are commentating a golf game,
which reminds me we haven't done a podcast on golf yet,
so maybe that's in the future. But Caroline, let's reassure
our listeners that there's some fascinating stuff to talk about. Yeah,
hold onto your butts, people, this is exciting stuff. Chess,
the history of women playing chess, but the history of
(00:49):
the chess game itself has a lot to do with women. Yes,
so hold onto your butts. Also, hold onto your ponds
because I'm gonna be trying to throw out some chess
puns throughout this podcast. So there's that to look forward
to as well. So we do have a news item
to kick things off with that initially got us thinking
(01:11):
about women and chess because there is a new Lady
grand Master of Chess in the making and she is
twelve years old. Yeah, when you say lady grand Master,
I picture not only a fully grown adult woman, but
someone wearing like a cape a wizard cloak perhaps, but no, Yeah,
(01:31):
this is twelve year old Jennifer You, who back in
October became the first American girl in twenty seven years
to win the title at the World Youth Chess Championship.
She won eleven matches in a row and has rated
a National Master by the US Chess Federation. She's also
(01:51):
rated a Women's National Master by the World Chess Federation.
And she is the best twelve year old female player
in the world and the seventeen best female player of
any age in the United States. So Jennifer You is,
in other words, really really, really good at chess. But
what's also fascinating about Jennifer is that she picked up
(02:14):
chess on her own. She wasn't prodded by her parents.
It was just something that she took a liking to. Yeah,
her parents are scientists and researchers, and they were like, oh,
that's that's nice, that's fine, you can play chess. They
didn't like take her to camps or anything like that.
And it wasn't until one of Jennifer's coaches. I think
(02:36):
the family was about to move from one coast to
the other coast, and one of the coaches was like, hey, um,
by the way, your daughter is brilliant, so you're gonna
need to go ahead and take her to to chess
championships and things like that. And it's also such a
big deal though, because she's a girl. So not only
is it rare to find a talent at this age,
(02:58):
just being twelve years old, but also a female talent. Yeah,
because you know the history of this particular game, I mean,
women have played it, but in terms of the modern
era and competitive chess, I mean, you just do not
see a lot of women. So let's get into a
bit of that history. Now, we could do an entire
(03:20):
podcast just on the history of chess because it is
long and it is fascinating, but we have a lot
to talk about in terms of women in chess, so
we just have to give you the condensed version. So
chess is one of the oldest games in the world.
It was likely invented in Eastern India by the sixth century,
and it was first referred to as chataranga in Sanskrit,
(03:42):
which might sound familiar to any yogi's out there because
chataranga which translates to the four members is the common
move that you do throughout your yoga practice. Um. But
the four members in that original chess represented the four
parts of the Indian army chariots, elephants, cavalry, infantry, and
(04:04):
then you have the king and the general. No queen
at this point, no queen. So the game quickly spreads
from India to Persia by the seventh century, and then
onto China, Russia and Europe thanks to Muslim traders. And
what I did not realize, I mean, why would I
am not really a chess player. I didn't learn until
(04:25):
college and I have since forgotten how to play. I
hate admitting that, but fun fact, we get our word
check as in checkmate, from the Persian word shaw because
the whole thing with king and checkmate basically means the
king is, the king is exhausted, the king is spent,
and so sha mat evolved into checkmate. Yeah. And as
(04:48):
chess spread around the Middle East and into Europe, it
became a really fashionable game among the medieval elite, and
by the fifteenth century the game had undergone a major
change with the introduction of the queen piece. Because at
first it was just the visier or general who would
sit next to the king, and that was the weakest
(05:11):
piece on the board. But then the queen comes along
replaces the visier, and at first she also is the
weakest piece on the board, can only move one diagonal
space at a time, but not for long, that's right.
And in this fascinating information that Chris seriously, christ and
I could spend a whole episode talking about is coming
(05:31):
from Marylyn Yalom, who wrote an entire book about it
called Birth of the Chess Queen, which seriously, we're going
to have to get that book. So she talks about
how in the late nineties, not n nineties, we have
the first recorded sighting of a queen piece in a
Swiss monastery in a Latin poem Versus on Chess, and
(05:56):
like Kristen said, this original queen still didn't have much power.
She was really we couldn't move around the board a
whole lot. But in the fifteenth century the queen gets
more power. So the Birth of the Chess Queen that
Elm rights is essentially a thesis of how the evolution
(06:18):
of the queen piece into becoming the most powerful piece
on the chess board parallels the real world medieval warrior
queens who were wielding incredible amounts of power around the
same time. For instance, in tenth century Spain, you up
Toote of Navarre, who went to battle to install her
grandson on the throne of Leone. So Grandma out to war,
(06:43):
although Grandma at the time was probably like thirty oh Grandma.
And then one of my favorite queens of all time
in twelfth century France, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was the
most powerful woman of the Middle Ages, who actually when
she was born, her dad died left her all of
this land in France, and she actually owned more land
(07:04):
in France than the King of France at the time.
That's just how powerful she was. Um And at one
point though after she had married, she had married and
then divorced the King of France and ends up marrying
the King of England and at one point plotted to
kill her husband, Henry the Second of England, to rest
the power through her sons, and she ended up outliving
(07:24):
her son Richard the Lionhearted, and sort of held this
kingdom together. That's sort of not sort of, that's very
game of throne. It's a very game of thrones well
in speaking of chess in medieval times and how in
this much slower game before the queen could zoom all
over the place and it really sped up the pace.
(07:45):
It was associated with medieval courtship and courtly love, and
the fact that these chess games kind of like anytime
I play Monopoly, would take place over an entire day.
You would have breaks for I imagined, you know, chicken, drumsticks,
and goblets of wine. And that was how men and
(08:06):
women flirted because it was what you know. They could
sit at a table, their knees might even touch underneath.
And Eleanor of Aquitaine is known in history as sort
of developing this system of courtly love, although as fans
of stuff he missed in history class might know the
whole idea of Eleanor forging this courtly love as we
(08:29):
think of it today is a bit of historical myth,
but still a fun one. Yeah, I love it and
I love that Ylum draws these parallels between queen's power
and the revolutionizing of the game thanks to the queen
peace and in reference to Eleanor as well as Blanche
of Castile, the twelfth century Queen of France, Lam writes
(08:51):
their illustrious rains coincided with the spread of chess in
France and England and enhanced the prestige of the queen
on the board. Yeah, and some examples of these warrior
queens get pretty intense as well, which only makes this,
to me her thesis even stronger, because when you think
(09:14):
about fifteenth century Portuguese queen Queen Isabella of Castile, who
not only united the country financed Christopher Columbus is foreign travel,
she also exiled Spain's Jews, expelled the Moors, and ran
the Spanish Inquisition. That woman was terrifying, She hurt to do.
List was a mile long, yes, and vengeful, yeah, a
(09:37):
little a little bit of a controversial historical figure, probably
racist a little bit, yeah. Um. But so if we
moved to the eighteenth century, it's notable that in Russia
that old vizier piece, the the general, the weak piece
that sat next to the king, did not become the
queen or zaritza until the historical example of Catherine the
(10:00):
Great was available. Yeah. So there seems to be a
really compelling parallel between history and the development of this game.
But the ironic thing about the queen and chess becoming
the most powerful piece on the board, perhaps as some
kind of homage to these real world queens wielding all
(10:21):
sorts of power. Is that it increased the competitiveness of
chess and essentially, in doing so, excluded the women, even
though in the early days of chess women were welcome
to play in a to tow a d For instance,
one of the earliest known references to a woman playing
(10:43):
chess comes from a letter written in Sanskrit mentioning the
purchase of a slave girl quote for her skill in
chess and talented chess playing women are also a common
feature in early Arabic literature. Yeah, and so you know,
back in the days before the game was changed by
the more aggressive queen peace, as Krista mentioned, it was
(11:07):
a great way for men and women, especially wealthy men
and women to spend endless monopoly esk hours together, cording
to the point where in the Middle Ages there was
even a book of erotic chess published. And so when
we get this newly aggressive game, it's much more competitive,
(11:29):
it's much more becomes much more masculine and male dominated
and a lot less erotic. I think we should bring
back erotic chess totally. Apparently there's this I didn't have
time to google image it, but there's apparently this painting,
uh depicting Napoleon playing chess with a woman and she's naked.
(11:51):
So I don't know if they were reading from the
Book of Erotic Chess, if they were playing strip chess
or what. Strip chess the slowest, the slowest drinking and
game playing ever. You yeah, you'll you'll be probably naked
and passed out before before anyone wins. But it's you.
I never would have thought about that side of the
(12:13):
history of chess too, as it being this tool for,
if not sex, sometimes just this medieval courting. Yeah, as
a kind of innocent basically excuse to hang out yea
and touch knees. So here's a fun tip for any
singles out there. You could you could play chess. No,
(12:37):
but I mean, okay, so not to play at all
about me, but it was a boyfriend in college who
taught me how to play chess, and it was that
was a nice way to spend evenings. Yeah, in college,
in college, drinking and playing chess, smoking your pipe that's
right with my smoking jacket. Yep, yes, um, but again
the Once the game sped up, the women were excluded
(12:59):
espec essentially as we became more of a competition. But
if you jump forward to the nineteenth century, it's really
interesting to see how women tried to keep the competitive
chess dream alive. And a lot of this timeline is
coming from a fantastic and indispensable post over its skep
Chick by Brian m and also from Encyclopedia Britannica, which
(13:23):
talks about how as competitive chess really ramps up in
the nineteenth century, women weren't welcome in the coffee houses
or in chess clubs where guys were playing chess. Yeah. Well,
we've talked about that in our coffee episode, that like
these these great places for hanging out and developing business
bonds and personal bonds and getting a leg up in
(13:45):
society playing chess, playing chess, women just weren't permitted entrance,
but that did not keep them from playing. In eighteen thirty,
that's when we get our first recorded modern female chess player.
But I believe that her name wasn't recorded, Is that right? Yeah,
I tried to track down a name, but it was unsuccessful. Yeah.
And so then in eighty seven, the first or one
(14:07):
of the first ever women's chess clubs opens in Holland,
so you can play chess and have your tulips. I'm
sure it was lovely. Yes, there was always a vase
of tulips on every table at the Women's chest Club. Perfect.
And then in eighteen sixty we get the publication of
a wonderful book which I should read if I ever
want to remember how to play chess. It's called The A. B.
(14:28):
C's of Chess by a Lady and it actually ended
up going into ten editions. Yeah. I was reading through
it and was expecting it to be some since it
was authored by this anonymous lady. I was thinking it
was going to be some kind of ladies guide to chess.
But it's really straightforward. It's just a basic, gender neutral
this is how to play chess, no other mention of ladies.
(14:52):
So it's not like keep your eyes down, cross your
legs now. If you're feeling fancy, touches me with your
own and the table. And then as far as competition goes,
in eighteen seventy nine, Ellen Gilbert defeated strong English amateur
George Gossip, which that just sounds like a fake George Gossip.
(15:12):
See exactly, she defeated him twice in an international correspondence match,
which is chess by letter, chess by mail. That was
really hot back then there was no cable. But talk
about a slow game, especially if it's a transatlantic correspondence match. Yeah,
(15:33):
you'd be playing that game for years. Well, I mean,
I guess that's that that ties very well into the
whole thing about chess, which is, um, you need such
concentration skills, such power of of memory and forethought and planning,
and so I would imagine that you know, I'm sure
you have your board at home that you're working with,
(15:54):
and then you mail off your your thing to your competitor,
and so I mean that is a lot of built
in time to just sit there and stare at the
board and thing. Yeah. But I also wonder if correspondence
matches between male and female players at the time we've
seen as more acceptable than Ellen Gilbert actually sitting down
across the table from George Gossip. That probably would have
(16:15):
been unheard of because even today, as we'll talk about more,
chess games are highly gender segregated, where women play women
and men play men. And I could only imagine that
if that's the way it often is today, it would
certainly have been that way in eighteen seventy nine. Yeah,
and so then in eighteen eighty four the Sussex Chess
(16:36):
Association sponsors the first women's tournament, and then in eighteen
eighty nine we have the earliest known women's simultaneous chess exhibition. Yeah,
that's where you are playing multiple games at one time.
You kind of just go around and make your move,
next table, make your move, and talk about needing some
focus and attention and memory um on that. Yeah, that's no,
(17:01):
I can't. Well, in the Women's Chess Association of America
forms Vira Menschick wins the first women's World Chess Championship.
Not keep in mind that that all of these milestones
are about thirty to fifty years behind men's chess milestones.
(17:23):
So long before Vera mens Chick one, men were playing
in their own world championships and forming their own clubs
and their own associations. And as with a lot of
topics that we've talked about before, women kind of it
took a bit longer for women to organize and start
their own thing. And of course, even this is something
(17:43):
we still see today in chess is these women's groups.
By virtue of being the women's groups are usually seen
as secondary in terms of the level of competition. So,
for instance, famed American grand master Bobby Fisher, who's probably
the most famous chess player in American history, once said
(18:04):
about women playing chess, quote, they're all weak, all women.
They're stupid compared to men. They shouldn't play chess, you know,
they're like beginners. They lose every single game against a man.
There isn't a woman player in the world. I can't
give night odds to and still beat so and and
(18:25):
and that. And that sums up a lot of the
sentiment regarding women's talent with chess, because there's this whole
question of, well, maybe women don't play chess as much,
and there aren't as many female grand masters because women
aren't as good at chess, and because chess is such
a highly intellectual game, then perhaps this is a great
(18:47):
example about women and men's brains are different, and perhaps
guys are just well smarter. I'm literally I I was
just faking an eyed spasm, but I now have a
realized spasm in my high after you just said that,
because of course that's bull hank, because of course this
is super paralleled, and it is just in my brain,
but also in so many different things that Kristen and
I read super paralleled with conversations about the stem field.
(19:11):
But Caroline, the Devil's Advocate, would say, riddle me this.
Why out of one thousand, four three current grand masters,
that's as of only three are women. There has never
been a female chess World championship, and only three percent
(19:33):
of all international masters or women, and only point two
percent of chess masters are women based on the E
l O rating system, because there and and the E
l O system is or l O is the universal
chess rating system where this is how you get worldwide rankings.
(19:53):
So why why is that? Caroline? Well, I mean, obviously,
as as you might expect from listening to a stuff
Mom Ever told you podcast, there there are a lot
of things that go into this, into this reasoning. Part
of it is that women only titles require fewer points,
for example, hundred points to become a woman grand Master
(20:13):
versus d to become a gender neutral just general grand
master person. Yeah, and and the guy who developed the
l rating system, whose last name is Llo. Then's the
Namestake has in more recent years called for just gender
neutrality across the board. Now, in more recent years, the
(20:35):
l rating system essentially took away most of the waiting
that it gave two women sort of compensate for the
gender gap to try to put them on a level
playing field. But the fact that you still have a
designated woman grand master that requires twohun or less points
still shows that it's they're they're in their own league. Yeah,
(20:59):
I mean, I was definitely arguing with myself in my
own brain reading all of these sources because on the
one hand, I totally disagree with the notion that women
should have lower qualifying scores. I totally think that, And
of course I'm just kind of shooting from the hip
right now, so bear with me. But um, I mean,
(21:19):
I totally think there should just be a grand master period,
you know, just gender neutral man or woman whoever can
qualify that women should have the same level of qualifying
points as men. Um But on the other hand, I mean,
I see the argument from some female chess players on
the scene today who say, Okay, yeah, I get it, equality,
(21:40):
gender parody, all that stuff. However, because of certain issues
that we haven't been able to fix yet for instance,
women chess players not being able to secure as many
sponsorships or as lucrative of sponsorships as men can, and
not having as much prize money. This like harkens back
to our tennis episode. Um, if some of the qualifying
(22:01):
rules are made to be more stringent or too stringent,
that could drive away more casual chess players who say
I'll just go get a job where I can actually
make money. Well, in speaking of tennis for instance, and
the fact that you know, in most professional sports you
have the men's game and the women's game. Chess is
(22:23):
looked at so much in terms of gender because it
is considered one of the only sports and yes, people
consider this a sport, one of the only sports where
men and women can play each other. And so that's
why there there is this focus on what role women
have in it because, like you said, Caroline, like there's
(22:46):
an argument for taking away all of like making it
all gender neutral, but there's also valid argument for having
giving more of a space for women to play to
begin with, right, And so we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Will get into more of these issues in just a second.
But if we look back to night no na Ga
Prentishvilli became the first female chess player to achieve grand master,
(23:07):
but it was because she defeated for male grand masters,
not because she had actually accumulated the requisite number of points. Yeah.
So some people said that's awesome, but not really because
she didn't go through the traditional channels. Because this was
around the time when people were thinking, you know what,
(23:28):
let's let's see if we can get more women in
the upper ranks of chess. But then the Pulgar sisters
from Hungary came along and filipp the gender segregated chess
table over. In nine six, Susan Pulgar, who was the
top rated female player in the world at age fifteen,
(23:50):
she became the first woman to ever qualify for the
quote Men's World Chess Championship, and she earned the grand
master her status through the traditional route of earning all
of those points. Yeah, I mean, and she was not
alone in this. Much like if we're continuing to draw
tennis parallels, like the Williams sisters who are amazing at
(24:14):
what they do, but who had parents who were dedicated
to making them amazing, the Pulgar sisters had parents who
were pushing them into chess too, but so Jude, it
was even better. She's probably the best female player in history,
and she just recently retired. Actually, yeah, she was the
number ten player in the world, which is the highest
(24:34):
ranking worldwide ranking a woman has achieved in chess. At
her height, she was the number ten player in the world,
which is the highest worldwide ranking of female chess players
ever achieved, with an l score of two thousand, seven
hundred thirty five, the highest ever achieved by a female player.
And she even beat Bobby Fisher as a record. And
it's interesting that Bobby Fisher was aware of the Pulgar Sisters.
(24:59):
She ended up haying out with them, He played chess
with them, and they had a pretty good relationship. Like
when he died, they you know, had very nice things
to say about him, which is so which is interesting
considering that quote that I read. But I have a
feeling that he saw them as obviously as outliers. I mean,
(25:19):
they are outliers in terms of um achievement of women
in chess, as evidenced further by this lead from a
two thousand one New York Times article talking about Judah,
which said, in the highly masculine world of top level chess.
It's no disgrace to lose to Juda Pulgar. In person,
(25:40):
Ms Pulgar gives no hint that she is a tigress
at the chessboard. She is soft spoken, modest, and very feminine.
Come on, I okay, you know. I mean the two
are not mutually exclusively, but they also don't depend on
each other either. I mean. But what's really fascinating though
about the older sisters is that none of them ever
(26:03):
won a women's world championship title because they never bothered
to compete for it. They were so good and so
focused and probably so parentally driven in that focus that
they avoided women's competitions all together because they said, you know,
it's screw it with those women's titles. It doesn't require
as many points. We want to go for the full
(26:25):
on grand mastership. And they did. And even even their
middle sister, Sophia, is also herself an international master. So
this is I mean, those parents didn't bother with piano
less them, No, no, they clearly stuck to chess. But
with Judah Pulgar being the only woman who has ever
broken the top one hundred world rankings and still no
(26:48):
woman to ever win the world title. There's been a
lot of research though on this lingering gender gap, not
only in participation but also in performance at the chess board,
and it's really fascinating to see how academics have looked
into chess as this broader um investigation into perhaps sex
(27:12):
differences in intelligence. Well, so, there are four major predictors
of chess performance and those include ability, verbal knowledge, memory,
and motivation. And furthermore, chess ability is best predicted by
deliberate practice. So much so much practice. It's not are
(27:37):
you such a smart cookie? Are you born with some
inherent chess ability? Like where you playing chess in utero?
It is certain skills, yes, it's certain memory skills and
certain motivational skills, but it is also do you have
the ability and the time and the drive to practice. So,
(27:57):
going back, for instance, to Jennifer You, who we talked
about at the top but the podcast, who recently took
the title at the World Youth Chess Championship, Grand Master
Larry Christiansen told the Washington Post quote, she has great
vision of the sixty four squares, tactical alertness, superior memory,
will to win, and most especially strong mental stamina, So
(28:21):
you need a whole tool set in order to really
dominate at the table. But some people think though that
boys are likelier to have that tool set because of
their testosterone mediated visio spatial skills. Because if you think
about it, um, and I didn't realize this before we're
searching for this podcast, how when you're playing competitive chess,
(28:45):
it does require the ability to see in your mind
the chess tape, the chess board from the reverse angle, right, yeah,
And I mean this is the same stuff. Not to
continue to site amazing stuff overteld you episodes, but it's
similar to what we talked about in our Lego episode
(29:05):
about the importance of playing with those kinds of toys
to develop these videospatial skills, to be able to plan
how something will look as you're creating it, and how
big it will be and what that means for the
size of the rooms, etcetera, etcetera. Things like that. But
the same sort of mental skills go into chess, and
that is not a gendered thing, as so many people suspect.
(29:28):
It's simply that boys are likelier to play with toys
like that, and perhaps boys are also likelier to learn
from a young age how to play chess, whereas perhaps
girls parents aren't as keen on teaching them. Yeah, when
it comes to the research on the gender gap in chess,
they really attribute this performance gap to two big things
that lower participation rate and also stereotype threat. So there
(29:54):
was a study published in two thousand nine and the
proceedings of the Royal Society be titled why are the
best women so good at Chess? Participation Rates and Gender
Differences in Intellectual Domains, And it noted that the best
male chess players are better than the best female chess players. Yes,
(30:15):
but they found nine percent of that difference is accounted
for by the size of the male brain simply being larger.
And I'm just kidding. It was accounted for by statistical
sampling of the best men coming from a huge pool
of players compared to the best women coming from a
tiny pool of female players. Yeah, and so talking about
(30:39):
the size of those pools from which the talent is drawn,
it's not a factor purely of girls just dropping out
of competitive chess at equal skill levels. Boys and girls
both drop out roughly at the same rate. It's just
that from the get go they're way more boys than
girls participating. Yeah, that was that was something that seemed
(31:02):
to surprise most of the researchers, that uh, equality in
the dropout right, because initially the assumption was, well, girls
just drop out because a lot of times when it
comes to girls and you know, childhood sports or early
kinds of talents, there is a bit of a drop
off that tends to happen around puberty. Um, but boys
(31:23):
drop out. Two and a two thousand six study in
Psychological Science also notes that once the World Chess Federation
quit gender waiting those l O scores, men's bottom averages
have actually drifted lower while women's have risen. So without
that waiting, they it's interesting to see how both of
(31:45):
them are kind of shaking out a little more equally.
But we also need to talk about that stereotype threat
because women have been systematically excluded from the game of
chess for centuries now, and it is such a male
dominated game that there is a pervasive stereotype that men
(32:05):
are simply better at chess. Just as a man's game.
It's something that father has passed down the son's and
it's this male to male battle of intellect at the board,
usually with thick grimmed glasses and tweed blazers involved, at
least in my mind's eye. Yeah, exactly, And basically, the
(32:27):
stereotype threat has a lot to do with, in this instance,
the way a woman performs when she's playing chess depending
on who she thinks she's playing. This is coming from
a two thousand seven study in the European Journal of
Social Psychology called Checkmate, the Role of Gender Stereotypes in
the Ultimate Intellectual Sport. So basically they had a woman
(32:47):
playing a person, the same person each time, and when
she thought it was a woman, she played great, she
played to the best of her ability, and she played aggressively. Yeah,
she played aggressively exactly. When she thought she was playing
a man, she played a more defensive strategy and her
play actually suffered. And that plays into a common pattern
(33:10):
of how men and women might play each other differently,
in that men and boys are likelier to play to win,
whereas women are likelier to play to not lose. In
other words, so there's more risk taking involved sometimes in
the man's game, especially if he's playing um a female player,
(33:32):
whereas women might tend to play more on the defensive,
which again can might be influencing the gap in performance too,
because it's a highly aggressive game and you want to
play to win. But speaking about how the women's game
is still kind of segmented off, chess champion and author
(33:53):
of the book Chess Bitch, Jennifer Schadate said, quote, the
category of women's chess does not refer to some intrinsically
female way of playing chess, but rather to being a
minority in the chess world, which can affect the way
a woman plays because again, like we've said, boys tend
to play more often, they play more competitive, they play
(34:15):
at higher levels just because the pool is larger, there
are more opportunities. So the question and the answer then
to the gender gap in chess for the game today,
for the sport, I should say today is really twelve
year old Jennifer you because she's the future and she
(34:36):
is a girl, and she's excelling at this high level.
But at the same time she's also she leaves a
question of how chess advocates like Susan Polgar, who's still
highly involved in the chess world, how do they get
more girls into the game, because a lot of them
do want more girls to play, But can the sport
(34:56):
overcome centuries of susion and also would it be useful
to get more women playing in just general tournaments and
sort of do away with the women's only system. Man,
I I don't know about doing away with the women's system,
(35:18):
because I mean a lot of women players have said,
you know, especially like Jennifer Shadaid who you just mentioned,
have argued for keeping it around just just to keep
women in chess and keep up that visibility. And like
you know, if you listen to the podcast and christ
and I have talked endlessly about, is the issue of
visibility of getting those women role models in front of
(35:40):
young girls to not only make it seem cool or
neat or fun, but to just make it seem normal. Yeah.
But I just wonder though, if as long as there
is the segmenting off of women into their own own tournaments,
in their own bubble, if the problem will persist. Yeah,
(36:02):
I mean personally, like non podcast official person Caroline I, I,
you know, non chess playing Caroline too, I think that
why shouldn't it all just be one yeah, big tournament,
just one big game of chess. That's what life is.
Because aren't we all pawns? Where are the Queen's girl,
I'm a queen. I did not toss in as many
(36:24):
puns as I would have liked. It was totally surprised.
I think I only got in one. I know, well,
checkmate myself, it's not even a pun. Okay, I'm going
to give up. Well, I hope there are some chess
players listening, because we want to hear your thoughts on
this mom Stuff at how Steve works dot com is
our email address. Let us know if you played chess
(36:46):
and why you do, what do you enjoy about it?
Email us. You can also tweet us at mom Stuff Podcast.
Our messages on Facebook, and we've got a couple of
messages to share with you right now. Blan gotta let
her here from Molly about her episode on PMS, and
she writes, I wrote my thesis on how pmd D
(37:09):
is communicated to women on the internet, and so I
wrote wrote a lot on the cultural constructions and the
d legitimization of women's experiences in the proposal, you guys
were spot on with everything about the feminist critique, the
medicalization of women, and the genealogical analyzes of the time
periods in which the diagnoses and quotes were invented for women.
(37:29):
I am so proud that there is a podcast about
women's experiences that takes a scholarly feminist pack. In the
end of your podcast, you posed some questions about which
directions we need to go with research. Now. My feeling
is that we must first leave behind the dichotomists thinking
that got us here sick not sick, women not women,
p ms, PMDD, et cetera. By focusing on continuums of emotions,
(37:53):
hormonal levels and depressive states, or men's tuating states, we
can find a lot more inclusion and understanding of these
experience is that are not so deterministic lee categorized. After all,
to categorize is to control and to maintain control over
our bodies. We must resist binary categorization within the heterosexual
matrix of patriarchy. Secondly, along these lines, research needs to
(38:15):
move to gathering data for women by women. Women are
the experts in the experience of menstruation and not the
kind of women who betray us to the patriarchy, like
Katherine Horney. We need women like Usher and Aaron Reich
at the forefront. We must move research toward by bringing
power to the female voice in these situations. We must
find ways to define ourselves outside the patriarchal discourse and
(38:37):
have our experiences without feeling bad about them. So thank you, Molly.
That was a very exciting, empowering email to read. Well.
I have a letter here from Amy again about our
PMS episode. She says, in grade school, during sex we
were taught the symptoms of PMS, and every time the
topic came up, which was maybe two or three times,
(38:58):
people would immediately launch into discussions of their minstrel cramps,
muddying the two. More than once, I've heard a woman
say I'm PMS NG so bad right now when referring
to minstrel cramps, which added to my confusion and I
think adds to the current misunderstanding of the term. Overall,
getting your period is a woman's right of passage, but
is still treated like something to be swept under the
rug and dealt with quietly and meekly, because you blood.
(39:20):
The idea of PMS is tied so heavily to menstrution
that announcing how badly you're PMS NG, especially in high school,
was basically announcing that you're part of that super secret
club and are officially a woman. The sad thing is
that we're more likely to make a joke than to
learn about our bodies, and no one to ask for help.
I learned about what age men needed to get their
prostate exams, why they turn and cough during exams, and
(39:42):
all sorts of penis related facts, before I learned that
the crippling, depressing, and crawling out of my skin feeling
the week before my period wasn't something I had to
quietly deal with alone. Love the show and the topics,
maybe not this one so much so, Thanks Amy, and
thanks to everybody who's written into us mom stuff at
how stuffworks dot com is our email address and for
(40:02):
links to all of our social media as well as
all of our blogs, videos, and podcasts, including this one
with sources so you can read along with us, head
on over to stuff Mom Never Told You dot com
for moral this and thousands of other topics. Isn't how
stuff Works dot com
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told you. From how Supports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, and today we are doing a podcast
all about chess, which I have a feeling sounds like
it has the potential to be the most boring podcast
(00:25):
in the world, as though we are commentating a golf game,
which reminds me we haven't done a podcast on golf yet,
so maybe that's in the future. But Caroline, let's reassure
our listeners that there's some fascinating stuff to talk about. Yeah,
hold onto your butts, people, this is exciting stuff. Chess,
the history of women playing chess, but the history of
(00:49):
the chess game itself has a lot to do with women. Yes,
so hold onto your butts. Also, hold onto your ponds
because I'm gonna be trying to throw out some chess
puns throughout this podcast. So there's that to look forward
to as well. So we do have a news item
to kick things off with that initially got us thinking
(01:11):
about women and chess because there is a new Lady
grand Master of Chess in the making and she is
twelve years old. Yeah, when you say lady grand Master,
I picture not only a fully grown adult woman, but
someone wearing like a cape a wizard cloak perhaps, but no, Yeah,
(01:31):
this is twelve year old Jennifer You, who back in
October became the first American girl in twenty seven years
to win the title at the World Youth Chess Championship.
She won eleven matches in a row and has rated
a National Master by the US Chess Federation. She's also
(01:51):
rated a Women's National Master by the World Chess Federation.
And she is the best twelve year old female player
in the world and the seventeen best female player of
any age in the United States. So Jennifer You is,
in other words, really really, really good at chess. But
what's also fascinating about Jennifer is that she picked up
(02:14):
chess on her own. She wasn't prodded by her parents.
It was just something that she took a liking to. Yeah,
her parents are scientists and researchers, and they were like, oh,
that's that's nice, that's fine, you can play chess. They
didn't like take her to camps or anything like that.
And it wasn't until one of Jennifer's coaches. I think
(02:36):
the family was about to move from one coast to
the other coast, and one of the coaches was like, hey, um,
by the way, your daughter is brilliant, so you're gonna
need to go ahead and take her to to chess
championships and things like that. And it's also such a
big deal though, because she's a girl. So not only
is it rare to find a talent at this age,
(02:58):
just being twelve years old, but also a female talent. Yeah,
because you know the history of this particular game, I mean,
women have played it, but in terms of the modern
era and competitive chess, I mean, you just do not
see a lot of women. So let's get into a
bit of that history. Now, we could do an entire
(03:20):
podcast just on the history of chess because it is
long and it is fascinating, but we have a lot
to talk about in terms of women in chess, so
we just have to give you the condensed version. So
chess is one of the oldest games in the world.
It was likely invented in Eastern India by the sixth century,
and it was first referred to as chataranga in Sanskrit,
(03:42):
which might sound familiar to any yogi's out there because
chataranga which translates to the four members is the common
move that you do throughout your yoga practice. Um. But
the four members in that original chess represented the four
parts of the Indian army chariots, elephants, cavalry, infantry, and
(04:04):
then you have the king and the general. No queen
at this point, no queen. So the game quickly spreads
from India to Persia by the seventh century, and then
onto China, Russia and Europe thanks to Muslim traders. And
what I did not realize, I mean, why would I
am not really a chess player. I didn't learn until
(04:25):
college and I have since forgotten how to play. I
hate admitting that, but fun fact, we get our word
check as in checkmate, from the Persian word shaw because
the whole thing with king and checkmate basically means the
king is, the king is exhausted, the king is spent,
and so sha mat evolved into checkmate. Yeah. And as
(04:48):
chess spread around the Middle East and into Europe, it
became a really fashionable game among the medieval elite, and
by the fifteenth century the game had undergone a major
change with the introduction of the queen piece. Because at
first it was just the visier or general who would
sit next to the king, and that was the weakest
(05:11):
piece on the board. But then the queen comes along
replaces the visier, and at first she also is the
weakest piece on the board, can only move one diagonal
space at a time, but not for long, that's right.
And in this fascinating information that Chris seriously, christ and
I could spend a whole episode talking about is coming
(05:31):
from Marylyn Yalom, who wrote an entire book about it
called Birth of the Chess Queen, which seriously, we're going
to have to get that book. So she talks about
how in the late nineties, not n nineties, we have
the first recorded sighting of a queen piece in a
Swiss monastery in a Latin poem Versus on Chess, and
(05:56):
like Kristen said, this original queen still didn't have much power.
She was really we couldn't move around the board a
whole lot. But in the fifteenth century the queen gets
more power. So the Birth of the Chess Queen that
Elm rights is essentially a thesis of how the evolution
(06:18):
of the queen piece into becoming the most powerful piece
on the chess board parallels the real world medieval warrior
queens who were wielding incredible amounts of power around the
same time. For instance, in tenth century Spain, you up
Toote of Navarre, who went to battle to install her
grandson on the throne of Leone. So Grandma out to war,
(06:43):
although Grandma at the time was probably like thirty oh Grandma.
And then one of my favorite queens of all time
in twelfth century France, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was the
most powerful woman of the Middle Ages, who actually when
she was born, her dad died left her all of
this land in France, and she actually owned more land
(07:04):
in France than the King of France at the time.
That's just how powerful she was. Um And at one
point though after she had married, she had married and
then divorced the King of France and ends up marrying
the King of England and at one point plotted to
kill her husband, Henry the Second of England, to rest
the power through her sons, and she ended up outliving
(07:24):
her son Richard the Lionhearted, and sort of held this
kingdom together. That's sort of not sort of, that's very
game of throne. It's a very game of thrones well
in speaking of chess in medieval times and how in
this much slower game before the queen could zoom all
over the place and it really sped up the pace.
(07:45):
It was associated with medieval courtship and courtly love, and
the fact that these chess games kind of like anytime
I play Monopoly, would take place over an entire day.
You would have breaks for I imagined, you know, chicken, drumsticks,
and goblets of wine. And that was how men and
(08:06):
women flirted because it was what you know. They could
sit at a table, their knees might even touch underneath.
And Eleanor of Aquitaine is known in history as sort
of developing this system of courtly love, although as fans
of stuff he missed in history class might know the
whole idea of Eleanor forging this courtly love as we
(08:29):
think of it today is a bit of historical myth,
but still a fun one. Yeah, I love it and
I love that Ylum draws these parallels between queen's power
and the revolutionizing of the game thanks to the queen
peace and in reference to Eleanor as well as Blanche
of Castile, the twelfth century Queen of France, Lam writes
(08:51):
their illustrious rains coincided with the spread of chess in
France and England and enhanced the prestige of the queen
on the board. Yeah, and some examples of these warrior
queens get pretty intense as well, which only makes this,
to me her thesis even stronger, because when you think
(09:14):
about fifteenth century Portuguese queen Queen Isabella of Castile, who
not only united the country financed Christopher Columbus is foreign travel,
she also exiled Spain's Jews, expelled the Moors, and ran
the Spanish Inquisition. That woman was terrifying, She hurt to do.
List was a mile long, yes, and vengeful, yeah, a
(09:37):
little a little bit of a controversial historical figure, probably
racist a little bit, yeah. Um. But so if we
moved to the eighteenth century, it's notable that in Russia
that old vizier piece, the the general, the weak piece
that sat next to the king, did not become the
queen or zaritza until the historical example of Catherine the
(10:00):
Great was available. Yeah. So there seems to be a
really compelling parallel between history and the development of this game.
But the ironic thing about the queen and chess becoming
the most powerful piece on the board, perhaps as some
kind of homage to these real world queens wielding all
(10:21):
sorts of power. Is that it increased the competitiveness of
chess and essentially, in doing so, excluded the women, even
though in the early days of chess women were welcome
to play in a to tow a d For instance,
one of the earliest known references to a woman playing
(10:43):
chess comes from a letter written in Sanskrit mentioning the
purchase of a slave girl quote for her skill in
chess and talented chess playing women are also a common
feature in early Arabic literature. Yeah, and so you know,
back in the days before the game was changed by
the more aggressive queen peace, as Krista mentioned, it was
(11:07):
a great way for men and women, especially wealthy men
and women to spend endless monopoly esk hours together, cording
to the point where in the Middle Ages there was
even a book of erotic chess published. And so when
we get this newly aggressive game, it's much more competitive,
(11:29):
it's much more becomes much more masculine and male dominated
and a lot less erotic. I think we should bring
back erotic chess totally. Apparently there's this I didn't have
time to google image it, but there's apparently this painting,
uh depicting Napoleon playing chess with a woman and she's naked.
(11:51):
So I don't know if they were reading from the
Book of Erotic Chess, if they were playing strip chess
or what. Strip chess the slowest, the slowest drinking and
game playing ever. You yeah, you'll you'll be probably naked
and passed out before before anyone wins. But it's you.
I never would have thought about that side of the
(12:13):
history of chess too, as it being this tool for,
if not sex, sometimes just this medieval courting. Yeah, as
a kind of innocent basically excuse to hang out yea
and touch knees. So here's a fun tip for any
singles out there. You could you could play chess. No,
(12:37):
but I mean, okay, so not to play at all
about me, but it was a boyfriend in college who
taught me how to play chess, and it was that
was a nice way to spend evenings. Yeah, in college,
in college, drinking and playing chess, smoking your pipe that's
right with my smoking jacket. Yep, yes, um, but again
the Once the game sped up, the women were excluded
(12:59):
espec essentially as we became more of a competition. But
if you jump forward to the nineteenth century, it's really
interesting to see how women tried to keep the competitive
chess dream alive. And a lot of this timeline is
coming from a fantastic and indispensable post over its skep
Chick by Brian m and also from Encyclopedia Britannica, which
(13:23):
talks about how as competitive chess really ramps up in
the nineteenth century, women weren't welcome in the coffee houses
or in chess clubs where guys were playing chess. Yeah. Well,
we've talked about that in our coffee episode, that like
these these great places for hanging out and developing business
bonds and personal bonds and getting a leg up in
(13:45):
society playing chess, playing chess, women just weren't permitted entrance,
but that did not keep them from playing. In eighteen thirty,
that's when we get our first recorded modern female chess player.
But I believe that her name wasn't recorded, Is that right? Yeah,
I tried to track down a name, but it was unsuccessful. Yeah.
And so then in eighty seven, the first or one
(14:07):
of the first ever women's chess clubs opens in Holland,
so you can play chess and have your tulips. I'm
sure it was lovely. Yes, there was always a vase
of tulips on every table at the Women's chest Club. Perfect.
And then in eighteen sixty we get the publication of
a wonderful book which I should read if I ever
want to remember how to play chess. It's called The A. B.
(14:28):
C's of Chess by a Lady and it actually ended
up going into ten editions. Yeah. I was reading through
it and was expecting it to be some since it
was authored by this anonymous lady. I was thinking it
was going to be some kind of ladies guide to chess.
But it's really straightforward. It's just a basic, gender neutral
this is how to play chess, no other mention of ladies.
(14:52):
So it's not like keep your eyes down, cross your
legs now. If you're feeling fancy, touches me with your
own and the table. And then as far as competition goes,
in eighteen seventy nine, Ellen Gilbert defeated strong English amateur
George Gossip, which that just sounds like a fake George Gossip.
(15:12):
See exactly, she defeated him twice in an international correspondence match,
which is chess by letter, chess by mail. That was
really hot back then there was no cable. But talk
about a slow game, especially if it's a transatlantic correspondence match. Yeah,
(15:33):
you'd be playing that game for years. Well, I mean,
I guess that's that that ties very well into the
whole thing about chess, which is, um, you need such
concentration skills, such power of of memory and forethought and planning,
and so I would imagine that you know, I'm sure
you have your board at home that you're working with,
(15:54):
and then you mail off your your thing to your competitor,
and so I mean that is a lot of built
in time to just sit there and stare at the
board and thing. Yeah. But I also wonder if correspondence
matches between male and female players at the time we've
seen as more acceptable than Ellen Gilbert actually sitting down
across the table from George Gossip. That probably would have
(16:15):
been unheard of because even today, as we'll talk about more,
chess games are highly gender segregated, where women play women
and men play men. And I could only imagine that
if that's the way it often is today, it would
certainly have been that way in eighteen seventy nine. Yeah,
and so then in eighteen eighty four the Sussex Chess
(16:36):
Association sponsors the first women's tournament, and then in eighteen
eighty nine we have the earliest known women's simultaneous chess exhibition. Yeah,
that's where you are playing multiple games at one time.
You kind of just go around and make your move,
next table, make your move, and talk about needing some
focus and attention and memory um on that. Yeah, that's no,
(17:01):
I can't. Well, in the Women's Chess Association of America
forms Vira Menschick wins the first women's World Chess Championship.
Not keep in mind that that all of these milestones
are about thirty to fifty years behind men's chess milestones.
(17:23):
So long before Vera mens Chick one, men were playing
in their own world championships and forming their own clubs
and their own associations. And as with a lot of
topics that we've talked about before, women kind of it
took a bit longer for women to organize and start
their own thing. And of course, even this is something
(17:43):
we still see today in chess is these women's groups.
By virtue of being the women's groups are usually seen
as secondary in terms of the level of competition. So,
for instance, famed American grand master Bobby Fisher, who's probably
the most famous chess player in American history, once said
(18:04):
about women playing chess, quote, they're all weak, all women.
They're stupid compared to men. They shouldn't play chess, you know,
they're like beginners. They lose every single game against a man.
There isn't a woman player in the world. I can't
give night odds to and still beat so and and
(18:25):
and that. And that sums up a lot of the
sentiment regarding women's talent with chess, because there's this whole
question of, well, maybe women don't play chess as much,
and there aren't as many female grand masters because women
aren't as good at chess, and because chess is such
a highly intellectual game, then perhaps this is a great
(18:47):
example about women and men's brains are different, and perhaps
guys are just well smarter. I'm literally I I was
just faking an eyed spasm, but I now have a
realized spasm in my high after you just said that,
because of course that's bull hank, because of course this
is super paralleled, and it is just in my brain,
but also in so many different things that Kristen and
I read super paralleled with conversations about the stem field.
(19:11):
But Caroline, the Devil's Advocate, would say, riddle me this.
Why out of one thousand, four three current grand masters,
that's as of only three are women. There has never
been a female chess World championship, and only three percent
(19:33):
of all international masters or women, and only point two
percent of chess masters are women based on the E
l O rating system, because there and and the E
l O system is or l O is the universal
chess rating system where this is how you get worldwide rankings.
(19:53):
So why why is that? Caroline? Well, I mean, obviously,
as as you might expect from listening to a stuff
Mom Ever told you podcast, there there are a lot
of things that go into this, into this reasoning. Part
of it is that women only titles require fewer points,
for example, hundred points to become a woman grand Master
(20:13):
versus d to become a gender neutral just general grand
master person. Yeah, and and the guy who developed the
l rating system, whose last name is Llo. Then's the
Namestake has in more recent years called for just gender
neutrality across the board. Now, in more recent years, the
(20:35):
l rating system essentially took away most of the waiting
that it gave two women sort of compensate for the
gender gap to try to put them on a level
playing field. But the fact that you still have a
designated woman grand master that requires twohun or less points
still shows that it's they're they're in their own league. Yeah,
(20:59):
I mean, I was definitely arguing with myself in my
own brain reading all of these sources because on the
one hand, I totally disagree with the notion that women
should have lower qualifying scores. I totally think that, And
of course I'm just kind of shooting from the hip
right now, so bear with me. But um, I mean,
(21:19):
I totally think there should just be a grand master period,
you know, just gender neutral man or woman whoever can
qualify that women should have the same level of qualifying
points as men. Um But on the other hand, I mean,
I see the argument from some female chess players on
the scene today who say, Okay, yeah, I get it, equality,
(21:40):
gender parody, all that stuff. However, because of certain issues
that we haven't been able to fix yet for instance,
women chess players not being able to secure as many
sponsorships or as lucrative of sponsorships as men can, and
not having as much prize money. This like harkens back
to our tennis episode. Um, if some of the qualifying
(22:01):
rules are made to be more stringent or too stringent,
that could drive away more casual chess players who say
I'll just go get a job where I can actually
make money. Well, in speaking of tennis for instance, and
the fact that you know, in most professional sports you
have the men's game and the women's game. Chess is
(22:23):
looked at so much in terms of gender because it
is considered one of the only sports and yes, people
consider this a sport, one of the only sports where
men and women can play each other. And so that's
why there there is this focus on what role women
have in it because, like you said, Caroline, like there's
(22:46):
an argument for taking away all of like making it
all gender neutral, but there's also valid argument for having
giving more of a space for women to play to
begin with, right, And so we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Will get into more of these issues in just a second.
But if we look back to night no na Ga
Prentishvilli became the first female chess player to achieve grand master,
(23:07):
but it was because she defeated for male grand masters,
not because she had actually accumulated the requisite number of points. Yeah.
So some people said that's awesome, but not really because
she didn't go through the traditional channels. Because this was
around the time when people were thinking, you know what,
(23:28):
let's let's see if we can get more women in
the upper ranks of chess. But then the Pulgar sisters
from Hungary came along and filipp the gender segregated chess
table over. In nine six, Susan Pulgar, who was the
top rated female player in the world at age fifteen,
(23:50):
she became the first woman to ever qualify for the
quote Men's World Chess Championship, and she earned the grand
master her status through the traditional route of earning all
of those points. Yeah, I mean, and she was not
alone in this. Much like if we're continuing to draw
tennis parallels, like the Williams sisters who are amazing at
(24:14):
what they do, but who had parents who were dedicated
to making them amazing, the Pulgar sisters had parents who
were pushing them into chess too, but so Jude, it
was even better. She's probably the best female player in history,
and she just recently retired. Actually, yeah, she was the
number ten player in the world, which is the highest
(24:34):
ranking worldwide ranking a woman has achieved in chess. At
her height, she was the number ten player in the world,
which is the highest worldwide ranking of female chess players
ever achieved, with an l score of two thousand, seven
hundred thirty five, the highest ever achieved by a female player.
And she even beat Bobby Fisher as a record. And
it's interesting that Bobby Fisher was aware of the Pulgar Sisters.
(24:59):
She ended up haying out with them, He played chess
with them, and they had a pretty good relationship. Like
when he died, they you know, had very nice things
to say about him, which is so which is interesting
considering that quote that I read. But I have a
feeling that he saw them as obviously as outliers. I mean,
(25:19):
they are outliers in terms of um achievement of women
in chess, as evidenced further by this lead from a
two thousand one New York Times article talking about Judah,
which said, in the highly masculine world of top level chess.
It's no disgrace to lose to Juda Pulgar. In person,
(25:40):
Ms Pulgar gives no hint that she is a tigress
at the chessboard. She is soft spoken, modest, and very feminine.
Come on, I okay, you know. I mean the two
are not mutually exclusively, but they also don't depend on
each other either. I mean. But what's really fascinating though
about the older sisters is that none of them ever
(26:03):
won a women's world championship title because they never bothered
to compete for it. They were so good and so
focused and probably so parentally driven in that focus that
they avoided women's competitions all together because they said, you know,
it's screw it with those women's titles. It doesn't require
as many points. We want to go for the full
(26:25):
on grand mastership. And they did. And even even their
middle sister, Sophia, is also herself an international master. So
this is I mean, those parents didn't bother with piano
less them, No, no, they clearly stuck to chess. But
with Judah Pulgar being the only woman who has ever
broken the top one hundred world rankings and still no
(26:48):
woman to ever win the world title. There's been a
lot of research though on this lingering gender gap, not
only in participation but also in performance at the chess board,
and it's really fascinating to see how academics have looked
into chess as this broader um investigation into perhaps sex
(27:12):
differences in intelligence. Well, so, there are four major predictors
of chess performance and those include ability, verbal knowledge, memory,
and motivation. And furthermore, chess ability is best predicted by
deliberate practice. So much so much practice. It's not are
(27:37):
you such a smart cookie? Are you born with some
inherent chess ability? Like where you playing chess in utero?
It is certain skills, yes, it's certain memory skills and
certain motivational skills, but it is also do you have
the ability and the time and the drive to practice. So,
(27:57):
going back, for instance, to Jennifer You, who we talked
about at the top but the podcast, who recently took
the title at the World Youth Chess Championship, Grand Master
Larry Christiansen told the Washington Post quote, she has great
vision of the sixty four squares, tactical alertness, superior memory,
will to win, and most especially strong mental stamina, So
(28:21):
you need a whole tool set in order to really
dominate at the table. But some people think though that
boys are likelier to have that tool set because of
their testosterone mediated visio spatial skills. Because if you think
about it, um, and I didn't realize this before we're
searching for this podcast, how when you're playing competitive chess,
(28:45):
it does require the ability to see in your mind
the chess tape, the chess board from the reverse angle, right, yeah,
And I mean this is the same stuff. Not to
continue to site amazing stuff overteld you episodes, but it's
similar to what we talked about in our Lego episode
(29:05):
about the importance of playing with those kinds of toys
to develop these videospatial skills, to be able to plan
how something will look as you're creating it, and how
big it will be and what that means for the
size of the rooms, etcetera, etcetera. Things like that. But
the same sort of mental skills go into chess, and
that is not a gendered thing, as so many people suspect.
(29:28):
It's simply that boys are likelier to play with toys
like that, and perhaps boys are also likelier to learn
from a young age how to play chess, whereas perhaps
girls parents aren't as keen on teaching them. Yeah, when
it comes to the research on the gender gap in chess,
they really attribute this performance gap to two big things
that lower participation rate and also stereotype threat. So there
(29:54):
was a study published in two thousand nine and the
proceedings of the Royal Society be titled why are the
best women so good at Chess? Participation Rates and Gender
Differences in Intellectual Domains, And it noted that the best
male chess players are better than the best female chess players. Yes,
(30:15):
but they found nine percent of that difference is accounted
for by the size of the male brain simply being larger.
And I'm just kidding. It was accounted for by statistical
sampling of the best men coming from a huge pool
of players compared to the best women coming from a
tiny pool of female players. Yeah, and so talking about
(30:39):
the size of those pools from which the talent is drawn,
it's not a factor purely of girls just dropping out
of competitive chess at equal skill levels. Boys and girls
both drop out roughly at the same rate. It's just
that from the get go they're way more boys than
girls participating. Yeah, that was that was something that seemed
(31:02):
to surprise most of the researchers, that uh, equality in
the dropout right, because initially the assumption was, well, girls
just drop out because a lot of times when it
comes to girls and you know, childhood sports or early
kinds of talents, there is a bit of a drop
off that tends to happen around puberty. Um, but boys
(31:23):
drop out. Two and a two thousand six study in
Psychological Science also notes that once the World Chess Federation
quit gender waiting those l O scores, men's bottom averages
have actually drifted lower while women's have risen. So without
that waiting, they it's interesting to see how both of
(31:45):
them are kind of shaking out a little more equally.
But we also need to talk about that stereotype threat
because women have been systematically excluded from the game of
chess for centuries now, and it is such a male
dominated game that there is a pervasive stereotype that men
(32:05):
are simply better at chess. Just as a man's game.
It's something that father has passed down the son's and
it's this male to male battle of intellect at the board,
usually with thick grimmed glasses and tweed blazers involved, at
least in my mind's eye. Yeah, exactly, And basically, the
(32:27):
stereotype threat has a lot to do with, in this instance,
the way a woman performs when she's playing chess depending
on who she thinks she's playing. This is coming from
a two thousand seven study in the European Journal of
Social Psychology called Checkmate, the Role of Gender Stereotypes in
the Ultimate Intellectual Sport. So basically they had a woman
(32:47):
playing a person, the same person each time, and when
she thought it was a woman, she played great, she
played to the best of her ability, and she played aggressively. Yeah,
she played aggressively exactly. When she thought she was playing
a man, she played a more defensive strategy and her
play actually suffered. And that plays into a common pattern
(33:10):
of how men and women might play each other differently,
in that men and boys are likelier to play to win,
whereas women are likelier to play to not lose. In
other words, so there's more risk taking involved sometimes in
the man's game, especially if he's playing um a female player,
(33:32):
whereas women might tend to play more on the defensive,
which again can might be influencing the gap in performance too,
because it's a highly aggressive game and you want to
play to win. But speaking about how the women's game
is still kind of segmented off, chess champion and author
(33:53):
of the book Chess Bitch, Jennifer Schadate said, quote, the
category of women's chess does not refer to some intrinsically
female way of playing chess, but rather to being a
minority in the chess world, which can affect the way
a woman plays because again, like we've said, boys tend
to play more often, they play more competitive, they play
(34:15):
at higher levels just because the pool is larger, there
are more opportunities. So the question and the answer then
to the gender gap in chess for the game today,
for the sport, I should say today is really twelve
year old Jennifer you because she's the future and she
(34:36):
is a girl, and she's excelling at this high level.
But at the same time she's also she leaves a
question of how chess advocates like Susan Polgar, who's still
highly involved in the chess world, how do they get
more girls into the game, because a lot of them
do want more girls to play, But can the sport
(34:56):
overcome centuries of susion and also would it be useful
to get more women playing in just general tournaments and
sort of do away with the women's only system. Man,
I I don't know about doing away with the women's system,
(35:18):
because I mean a lot of women players have said,
you know, especially like Jennifer Shadaid who you just mentioned,
have argued for keeping it around just just to keep
women in chess and keep up that visibility. And like
you know, if you listen to the podcast and christ
and I have talked endlessly about, is the issue of
visibility of getting those women role models in front of
(35:40):
young girls to not only make it seem cool or
neat or fun, but to just make it seem normal. Yeah.
But I just wonder though, if as long as there
is the segmenting off of women into their own own tournaments,
in their own bubble, if the problem will persist. Yeah,
(36:02):
I mean personally, like non podcast official person Caroline I, I,
you know, non chess playing Caroline too, I think that
why shouldn't it all just be one yeah, big tournament,
just one big game of chess. That's what life is.
Because aren't we all pawns? Where are the Queen's girl,
I'm a queen. I did not toss in as many
(36:24):
puns as I would have liked. It was totally surprised.
I think I only got in one. I know, well,
checkmate myself, it's not even a pun. Okay, I'm going
to give up. Well, I hope there are some chess
players listening, because we want to hear your thoughts on
this mom Stuff at how Steve works dot com is
our email address. Let us know if you played chess
(36:46):
and why you do, what do you enjoy about it?
Email us. You can also tweet us at mom Stuff Podcast.
Our messages on Facebook, and we've got a couple of
messages to share with you right now. Blan gotta let
her here from Molly about her episode on PMS, and
she writes, I wrote my thesis on how pmd D
(37:09):
is communicated to women on the internet, and so I
wrote wrote a lot on the cultural constructions and the
d legitimization of women's experiences in the proposal, you guys
were spot on with everything about the feminist critique, the
medicalization of women, and the genealogical analyzes of the time
periods in which the diagnoses and quotes were invented for women.
(37:29):
I am so proud that there is a podcast about
women's experiences that takes a scholarly feminist pack. In the
end of your podcast, you posed some questions about which
directions we need to go with research. Now. My feeling
is that we must first leave behind the dichotomists thinking
that got us here sick not sick, women not women,
p ms, PMDD, et cetera. By focusing on continuums of emotions,
(37:53):
hormonal levels and depressive states, or men's tuating states, we
can find a lot more inclusion and understanding of these
experience is that are not so deterministic lee categorized. After all,
to categorize is to control and to maintain control over
our bodies. We must resist binary categorization within the heterosexual
matrix of patriarchy. Secondly, along these lines, research needs to
(38:15):
move to gathering data for women by women. Women are
the experts in the experience of menstruation and not the
kind of women who betray us to the patriarchy, like
Katherine Horney. We need women like Usher and Aaron Reich
at the forefront. We must move research toward by bringing
power to the female voice in these situations. We must
find ways to define ourselves outside the patriarchal discourse and
(38:37):
have our experiences without feeling bad about them. So thank you, Molly.
That was a very exciting, empowering email to read. Well.
I have a letter here from Amy again about our
PMS episode. She says, in grade school, during sex we
were taught the symptoms of PMS, and every time the
topic came up, which was maybe two or three times,
(38:58):
people would immediately launch into discussions of their minstrel cramps,
muddying the two. More than once, I've heard a woman
say I'm PMS NG so bad right now when referring
to minstrel cramps, which added to my confusion and I
think adds to the current misunderstanding of the term. Overall,
getting your period is a woman's right of passage, but
is still treated like something to be swept under the
rug and dealt with quietly and meekly, because you blood.
(39:20):
The idea of PMS is tied so heavily to menstrution
that announcing how badly you're PMS NG, especially in high school,
was basically announcing that you're part of that super secret
club and are officially a woman. The sad thing is
that we're more likely to make a joke than to
learn about our bodies, and no one to ask for help.
I learned about what age men needed to get their
prostate exams, why they turn and cough during exams, and
(39:42):
all sorts of penis related facts, before I learned that
the crippling, depressing, and crawling out of my skin feeling
the week before my period wasn't something I had to
quietly deal with alone. Love the show and the topics,
maybe not this one so much so, Thanks Amy, and
thanks to everybody who's written into us mom stuff at
how stuffworks dot com is our email address and for
(40:02):
links to all of our social media as well as
all of our blogs, videos, and podcasts, including this one
with sources so you can read along with us, head
on over to stuff Mom Never Told You dot com
for moral this and thousands of other topics. Isn't how
stuff Works dot com
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