Feminist Looking Glass

I have written before about women’s sports like basketball and soccer.  I think it’s a great idea that the U.S. has professional women-only leagues like the WNBA and WPS.  As for the youth leagues in those sports, I think it makes sense for girls and boys to play together in their younger years and then to give girls the option of playing in girls-only leagues as they get older.

(And by the way, as we all know, there are plenty of sports-talk hosts and their callers-in who repeatedly ridicule all women’s sports.  A common “reason” they give is that the level of play in women’s sports is “inferior.”  The next time you hear a man say that, for instance, he will not watch the WNBA because the play is inferior to the NBA, ask him this:  Do you watch and like men’s college basketball?  High-school basketball?  The play there is inferior to the play in the NBA, isn’t it?  Just because you perceive some type of play to be inferior doesn’t mean that you don’t watch and like it, does it?  And use this as the ultimate kicker.  Have you ever played in some kind of a tournament as an adult, like basketball, tennis, racquetball?  You enjoyed that, didn’t you, even though you’re not as good as a professional.  So you don’t really care about the quality of play, do you.  What really matters is the competition and who is playing, doesn’t it?)

But what about chess?  I’ve never paid attention to chess rankings and tournaments other than the every-once-in-a-while match-ups of the world’s best that are written up in the main-stream press.  Those confrontations have always been between men.  But I just learned that there are separate “masters” rankings and tournaments for women.  The Wall Street Journal recently had a column that advocated the abolishment of women’s chess titles.  And then I saw an article yesterday in the Washington Post about the recently-held U.S. Chess Center’s “first all-girls chess tournament.”

The two articles tend to give the same reasons for why there are all-girls tournaments.  Here are some quotes from the WSJ:

“All-girls tournaments allow participants to make friends, share hotel-room expenses, and compete in Open tournaments,” says two-time U.S. Women’s Champion Jennifer Shahade, author of “Chess Bitch,” an informative and entertaining history of women in the game. “So rather than take women away from mixed competition, I think they actually encourage them to compete in the end.”

“Having both Open and Women’s divisions enables female players to earn money that helps them continue their professional pursuits.”

“The most serious challenge for top-rated female chess players in general,” says 25-year-old Russian GM Alexandra Kosteniuk, winner of the 2008 Women’s World Championship and another World Cup qualifier, “is to find commercial sponsors or institutional support, like from sports foundations or government sports committees.” As the mother of a toddler, she also cited the problems posed by frequent travel to international tournaments, many of which last for two or three weeks.

“Chess is a pretty solitary activity,” says Ms. Krush. “My feeling is that women overall are not as fanatical about it as men. The Polgar sisters worked very hard at chess from an early age, but it’s rare to see women being encouraged to do that or even wanting to do that. Women . . . [believe] there are other things in life.”

Both articles talk about “removing the intimidation factor” of having girls compete against boys.  One of the reasons for that is that the percentage of female participants is very low.  The World Chess Federation reports that ” women make up about 10% of the organization’s estimated one million members, 7.6% of 100,456 rated players, and 2% of the top 1,000 players world-wide.”

Relating to intimidation is this about a sixth-grader participating in the all-girls tournament:

This one [compared to the previous open tournament she had competed in], “was way more casual.” When a boy opponent says to her at the beginning of a match, “Are you ready to play?” Naomi feels as though what he is really saying is, “Are you ready to lose?”

And a third-grader had this to say about why she joined a chess club at her all-girls school:

“I just thought it sounded interesting. It’s fun, but it also helps you concentrate in school.”  A lot of boys do chess, but fewer girls, so it makes me feel special.”

But here is one reason given in the WSJ article for why gender-segregated titles should be abolished:

“I don’t see their benefit,” says 25-year-old IM Irina Krush. “Women’s titles are really a marker of lower expectations.”

Here is my favorite quote.  It comes from Joie Wang, a sixth-grader who tied for first in the all-girls tournament and has competed in dozens of tournaments.  When asked why she plays chess, she said, “I like how I beat people.”

I don’t know how I feel about whether there should be separate chess tournaments for girls and women.  Certainly, there is no difference in innate skill level even though the WSJ article says: “A number of aficionados claim that men have an edge because chess is a game of spatial relations, and some studies show men scoring higher than women in ‘mental rotation.’”  In simple terms, that is ridiculous.  That’s the same kind of ridiculous statement as the one given by Harvard president Larry Summers four years ago when he remarked that inferior “intrinsic aptitude” in science and engineering was responsible for the lack of women tenured in academia.   There is no difference in “intrinsic aptitude” of girls in math, science –or chess.

And the concept of multiple leagues based on some criteria is common, even among men.  For example, there are different divisions of college sports based on characteristics such as the number of students in the colleges, whether they want to offer scholarships, and how much money they want to spend.  Similarly, there are different divisions of public high-school sports based on the number of students.  In fact, for high school basketball, the state of Indiana created a major uproar some years ago when the officials decided to do away with the long-time, extremely-popular practice of awarding a single state boys basketball championship and instead awarding multiple state championships based on the number of students in a school.  The reason for that was to give more boys the opportunity to compete for state championships.

So, I guess that having separate tournaments and rankings for girls and women is okay.  But I have the nagging concern about competition and the statement that “Women’s titles are really a marker of lower expectations.”  And I don’t like it for young girls to feel “intimidated” by boys.  It would be nice for girls and women to be able to say that they are the best regardless of gender.  I think that only by having girls and boys compete together will those issues be able to be overcome.

But the “compromise,” I suppose, is to have “open” tournaments in addition to men’s and women’s.  That is what chess has been doing.  I don’t have a better solution.

Filed under: Pop Culture, Sports Tagged: | Chess, Girls-Only Tournaments, Sports, Stereotypes