I love science, because the universe has very little tolerance for wishful thinking. You can believe whatever kind of nonsense you like about how the world works, but eventually the data will come along and slap you upside the head. Sadly, not everyone lets the sting of reality affect their prejudices, but that's another story. Here's a fact: among chess grandmasters, there are a lot more men than women. Chess is great, because it's pretty much a meritocracy, not an old-boys network (colorful parables notwithstanding). There is a simple old-fashioned sexist explanation for this phenomenon, which is that women just aren't as good at chess as men are. Back in the veldt, you see, when the men were celebrating a successful hunt by playing chess with sticks in the dirt, the women were busy washing the dishes, so there was no evolutionary pressure for them to develop those skills. These days, however, there is a more sophisticated new-fangled sexist explanation for these kinds of discrepancies, which invokes bell curves. It's not, so the story goes, that the average woman isn't just as good as the average man, it's just that their standard deviations are different, so there is underrepresentation at the high end. This hypothesis suffers under the weight of making all sorts of predictions that aren't true, but it's kind of scientific-sounding, so it's gained a measure of popularity in certain circles. So now someone has looked in detail at the situation in chess. Jake Young at Pure Pedantry points to a study by Chabris and Glickman, "Sex Differences in Intellectual Performance: Analysis of a Large Cohort of Competitive Chess Players." I noticed the link at Marginal Revolution, and I agree with Tyler Cowen about the most striking findings:
They found no greater variance in men than women. It had been suggested that since science selects for individuals at the upper tail of the distribution, a higher variance in men than women might explain their greater representation. However, the researchers found that -- with respect to chess -- if anything in most age groups women had a higher variance then men. Upper tail effects do not explain the differences in the numbers of grandmasters...
And:
If you look at the participation rate of women and relate that to performance, you find that in cases where the participation rate of women and men is equal the disparity in ability vanishes. Basically, this means that in zip codes where there are equal numbers of men and women players there is no great disparity between male and female ability -- and certainly not a disparity in ability large enough to explain the difference in the numbers of grandmasters.
How about that? It's not any differences in innate ability, it's just that women are "choosing" not to play competitive chess. Choosing is put in scare quotes because there's obviously going to be a great deal of influence from parents encouraging/discouraging their kids at a very young age, but whatever. It's a shame if young girls who would have been enthusiastic about chess are pushed away by social pressures of one form or another, but for most people chess is not a central part of their lives. It's a much bigger deal when women (or whomever) are enthusiastic about choosing something as a career, and are pushed away by an impressive battery of systematic biases. Which is what is clearly going on in science, especially in physics. If girls are given just as much encouragement and opportunity as boys are, and nevertheless choose to become truck drivers or gourmet chefs rather than scientists, that's fine with me -- the goal has never been equal representation of the genders, it's equal chances for everyone to do what they find interesting. But we have a long way to go before we get there.
