Mick Hartley

It's possible that the only reason many of us in the UK are aware of FIDE's decision to ban trans players from women's chess tournaments is because the story was behind the Justin Webb affair , when the BBC tied itself in knots over an employee daring to suggest live on air that trans women are in fact men.

Anyway, Carole Hooven now has a long article at Quillette – Why Do Men Dominate Chess?

Well – it's complicated. She looks at possible explanations:

More men take up the game.
Straightforward sexism.
Greater male variance: the ability curve for men is more spread out, so you'd get more top-class male players, and also presumably more rubbish players as well.
Innate male differences. These would include not just possible factors such as spatial awareness, but also the single-minded determination to practice, to compete, and to win.

In the end – and it's worth reading the whole piece – she comes down more with the latter: male determination, single-mindedness, and competitiveness.

Her conclusion:

I don’t see evidence for the idea that socialization alone explains the stronger male tendency to focus obsessively on doing whatever is necessary to win, even at board games. And there are good reasons to think that this tendency has an evolutionary basis: In the animal kingdom, males tend to devote more time, energy, and risk to status competition, since this tends to pay more reproductive benefits for males than females. So it’s not unreasonable to suspect that boys and men have some kind of biological advantage—possibly underpinned by higher lifetime exposure to testosterone—that helps explain their over-representation in tournament-level competition in general. (While this particular brand of competitiveness may have a strong evolutionary explanation, it is unlikely to be the wisest reproductive strategy in today’s world.)

Ultimately, sex differences in complex behaviors and skills are always a product of interactions between biology on the one hand (that is, our genes and their relatively fixed effects, such as hormone levels and body size) and our environment on the other (that is, factors such as our family circumstances, social dynamics, and cultural norms). Interactions between the two shape not only our skills and abilities, but also any emerging group differences. But none such complicating factors change the fact that the sex gap in chess is real and persistent. Given the circumstances that led to the creation of the female category, and the fact that many girls and women appreciate what this category offers, FIDE is correct to take the steps necessary to protect its integrity.

It's a strange pursuit, perhaps: pushing pieces round a board to defeat – to crush – your opponent. Despite the formal observation of decent manners – the cold hand-shake at the end – there's always the hint of humiliation dished out to the loser. To be really good you need to be obsessive, and very competitive – standard male characteristics. One woman commenter noted that the reason she gave up chess at college was because the mens' reaction when she beat them was so off-putting.