Poll of the Day > I can understand mens and womens sports but...

(+) Yeah! (+)

Why is there separation between the two for things like Chess?

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Because people like segregating competitions by sex and traditions are hard to break.

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To be fair, if we're going to argue that different body structure and capacity across different sexes means we should split sports up into gendered divisions, the fact that there may be signficant differences between male and female brains would justify doing the same for mental competition as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sex_differences
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In terms of chess, what I find absolutely incredible is that the top rated woman is approx. the 169th (URS) best player in the world. I've been watching the latest womens' tournament being held in Monaco recently. It was pretty disappointing to find out that most of the players competing there are 'only' about the 300th-800th best players in the world (of course that's still a worthy feat to achieve). As someone who is reasonably new to chess I assumed these top women I was watching were in the top 100-200. Really fascinating that there is such a huge divide between men and women at the very highest level.
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It's as though men occupy all the extremes.
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The only reason it's still divided is because of "tradishun" at this point. However, there are some interesting points of discussion with chess specifically in terms of gender. The video I've linked covers a few of them. It's worth noting that general discrepencies in the raw #s of chess players is probably the result of of culture and social structure. Aka, how many girls have older players teaching them chess while they're growing up as opposed to boys? For example, for a lot of people, the first person they played chess with was a father or grandfather. I haven't done any sort of research on this but I suspect it affects the raw # of players as well as the skill distribution among players.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHFZOXiM9SM

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Gaawa_chan posted...

It's worth noting that general discrepencies in the raw #s of chess players is probably the result of of culture and social structure. Aka, how many girls have older players teaching them chess while they're growing up as opposed to boys?

Not really a factor. This happens with basically every discipline, women just have lower uptake and interest, so who's going to train that?

Women haven't been culturally suppressed in the developed world for what... 50 years or so? It's long enough to realise where women are willing and competitive and it turns out the field isn't perfect parity with men.
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Kyuubi4269 posted...

Not really a factor. This happens with basically every discipline, women just have lower uptake and interest, so who's going to train that?

Women haven't been culturally suppressed in the developed world for what... 50 years or so? It's long enough to realise where women are willing and competitive and it turns out the field isn't perfect parity with men.

Putting aside your comment about "suppression," which is not what I was talking about... whenever I expressed interest in traditionally masculine stuff, people often outright refused to teach me.

Putting aside my personal experience, children are not inherently predisposed to favor gendered toys but discrepencies between children favoring gendered toys still exist, society still encourages preferencial differences in everything from colors to games to sports, which results in statistical variations of participation. I didn't say it was malicious. I didn't say it was suppressive. It just is. I find it strange that you'd even try to argue against something so obvious.

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Gaawa_chan posted...

whenever I expressed interest in traditionally masculine stuff, people often outright refused to teach me.

Probably should move to a developed country.

Gaawa_chan posted...

Putting aside my personal experience, children are not inherently predisposed to favor gendered toys

Apes naturally favour gendered toys and the most egalitarian countries have high discrepancies in interest, that's outright false.

Gaawa_chan posted...

society still encourages preferencial differences in everything from colors to games to sports

Nobody's encouraged to be a professional sportsman, it's a dreamer career that requires self-motivation until you can display competitive performance.

Gaawa_chan posted...

I find it strange that you'd even try to argue against something so obvious.

It's not though.
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Kyuubi4269 posted...

1 Probably should move to a developed country.

2 Apes naturally favour gendered toys and the most egalitarian countries have high discrepancies in interest, that's outright false.

3 Nobody's encouraged to be a professional sportsman, it's a dreamer career that requires self-motivation until you can display competitive performance.

4 It's not though.

1. Give me the money for it and I will.
2. I know the study you're talking about, did you even read it? That study found that MALE MONKEYS (not apes, btw, the study was on macaques) have a preference for gendered toys. Females do not. But we are not talking about rhesus macaques, are we?
3. That is patently false. Professional chess players are typically introduced to chess at a young age and encouraged to compete in chess at a young age, usually by one or both parents. You might have noticed that trend if you actually knew anything about professional chess players. Oh, and btw... getting into sports? That costs money. Who pays for you to get into sports at a young age? Your parents. My second sister got into classical ballet because my parents encouraged all of us to try it out, and she enjoyed it so my parents continued to pay for her dancing classes and encourage her to dance. And yes, it's like this for almost every single person on the planet. No, it's not the only factor, but it's a huge one, and that you would try to argue that it's not a factor at all is laughable.
4. It is, though. Someone has to pay for those chessboards. Someone has to take time and/or money for lessons and competitions. I'm starting to think you're being deliberately obtuse on this.

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Men generally care about competitive games more than women regardless if they are physical or not.

Women gaming leagues exist basically as a lower skill league for lower skilled women to play without having to compete with men in the "normal league" many of which, don't actually exclude women, it's just that, if you're a women in it for a profession, it's just kind of easier to win in the women league if you're a women if the women league exists.

Like, Starcraft 2 doesn't ban women from participating in regular tournaments, but they still sometimes, rarely, hold women only tournaments.
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Gaawa_chan posted...

Give me the money for it and I will.

I'm sorry for your circumstance, but only the developed world is relevant for discussion.

Gaawa_chan posted...

I know the study you're talking about, did you even read it? That study found that MALE MONKEYS (not apes, btw, the study was on macaques) have a preference for gendered toys. Females do not. But we are not talking about rhesus macaques, are we?

Which means men are more prone to it than women, which would mean you find more men doing male things. It also means that relative to men, women favour female gendered toys more, which is what's relevant.

Let's also remember that I noted that humans have demonstrated the same propensity when in an egalitarian environment, showing the significance of it built in to who we are as it's such an ancient trait even they share the trend.

Gaawa_chan posted...

That is patently false. Professional chess players are typically introduced to chess at a young age and encouraged to compete in chess at a young age, usually by one or both parents.

They are encouraged because they show interest and/or skill. Your family may favour railroading their kids but as you said, you're not in a developed country so we can't really expect your country to culturally raise children how we do.

Gaawa_chan posted...

getting into sports? That costs money. Who pays for you to get into sports at a young age? Your parents. My second sister got into classical ballet because my parents encouraged all of us to try it out, and she enjoyed it so my parents continued to pay for her dancing classes and encourage her to dance. And yes, it's like this for almost every single person on the planet. No, it's not the only factor, but it's a huge one, and that you would try to argue that it's not a factor at all is laughable.

As I said, in our developed world we don't railroad gender stereotypes so talent and interest is all that matters.

Gaawa_chan posted...

I'm starting to think you're being deliberately obtuse on this.

Your backwards country isn't relevant.
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Gaawa_chan posted...

That study found that MALE MONKEYS have a preference for gendered toys. Females do not.

So what you're saying is, there are measurable psychological differences between males and females, even in a species which lacks overall culture to enforce gender roles?



Gaawa_chan posted...

But we are not talking about rhesus macaques, are we?

They're actually pretty close to humans in terms of psychology and social behavior, though. It's part of why we gravitated to using them in experiments that would be infeasible or unethical to perform on actual humans.

CUE REFERENCE TO ONE OF PSYCHOLOGY'S EXTREMELY FAMOUS EXPERIMENTS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrNBEhzjg8I
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I wasn't going to bring this up because it wasn't relevant, but did it even occur to you to see if there was any research into the validity of that singular study you brought up?

Nvm, I'll do it for you, since you're insisting on sticking to this one...

It didn't even take me 30 seconds to find multiple serious critiques of everything from sample size, the animals used, the methodology, etc, from multiple sources.

Here's a few of them:
The monkeys used were monkeys that live in human captivity with regular contact from humans. It is commonly known that monkeys learn and imitate human behavior. The study did not use any wild monkeys. Therefore, there is no way to tell whether or not human contact biased the behavior of the animals in question (aka, there was NO CONTROL GROUP in this study, which automatically makes it utter trash). Sample size was tiny. Test was not repeated multiple times with different groups. No accounting for any sort of margin of error.

Their metric for "preference" was contact time. And nothing else. Not even whether or not they played with the objects.

One of the "feminine" toys selected was a cooking pot, Kyuubi. :-/

The way the toys were sequentially presented to the monkeys was flawed.

They did not select for anything other than the identity of the objects (aka, not color, texture, etc)

... Oh, geez, there are books specifically citing this study as being completely worthless... one's written by a PhD holder from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience... oh, the other one's a PhD scientist as well and that book is specifically on the failure to ensure that studies are sufficiently rigorous in their methodology. I am not reading books just to point out more flaws with this study that you're going to ignore anyway because said study says what you want it to say, but I honestly didn't expect it to be shredded this badly.

*Shrug* Should have looked all this up prior to my previous post. I don't check for peer review results often enough.

TL;DR, turns out the study was completely bogus anyway. What a twist!

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tl:dr
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

tl:dr

Lol the sheer fucking irony of a tl;dr coming from PO of all people.

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Kyuubi4269 posted...

Women haven't been culturally suppressed in the developed world for what... 50 years or so? It's long enough to realise where women are willing and competitive and it turns out the field isn't perfect parity with men.

Uhh, what? 50 years is nowhere close to long enough to eliminate cultural norms like that. That's barely two generations; a great many people who grew up under the "suppression" you mentioned are still alive and directly influencing the upbringing of children born today, to say nothing of the indirect influence of how they parented and influenced the previous generation. You grossly overestimate how quickly culture evolves.

Nobody's encouraged to be a professional sportsman,

Somebody's never met a set of hockey parents.

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adjl posted...

Uhh, what? 50 years is nowhere close to long enough to eliminate cultural norms like that. That's barely two generations

It's basically people's grandparents being raised in it and being the generation that rejected it. Do you think people are generally racist because of the odd racist grandpa? It hasn't been culturally acceptable for so long full-grown adults have no first hand experience of it at all.

adjl posted...

You grossly overestimate how quickly culture evolves.

A notable part of culture is how quickly it evolves.

adjl posted...

Somebody's never met a set of hockey parents.

Again, third world countries, like the US, aren't relevant.
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Kyuubi4269 posted...

It's basically people's grandparents being raised in it and being the generation that rejected it. Do you think people are generally racist because of the odd racist grandpa? It hasn't been culturally acceptable for so long full-grown adults have no first hand experience of it at all.

That doesn't mean you're suddenly going to have an abundance of old female chess pros mentoring a new generation of girls that are looking for role models, nor that all (or even a majority) of those old dudes are going to be so progressive as to want to give a girl pointers. Just because the cultural norm is no longer to say "women can't play chess" doesn't mean girls have the same access to chess resources that boys do. It'll get there, but there's absolutely no reason to expect that to happen in less than 50 years (and certainly not to conclude that there's something inherent preventing it from happening if it hasn't happened already).

Kyuubi4269 posted...

A notable part of culture is how quickly it evolves.

Compared to biological evolution, sure, but it's not that fast. Bear in mind that you're not talking about evolution in response to selective pressure being applied, you're talking about evolution in response to selective pressure being removed, which is generally going to be much slower because it lacks the pressure needed t drive the change.

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Kyuubi4269 posted...

Again, third world countries, like the US, aren't relevant.

Pretty sure you get the same phenomenon with football in pretty much any country outside of North America.

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adjl posted...

That doesn't mean you're suddenly going to have an abundance of old female chess pros mentoring a new generation of girls that are looking for role models, nor that all (or even a majority) of those old dudes are going to be so progressive as to want to give a girl pointers.

Sure, there'd be a lack of 78+ year old chess pros, but I don't think there are many pros at all that old. I would expect basically anybody post 1960 to have no reason to mindlessly exclude girls from chess.

adjl posted...

Just because the cultural norm is no longer to say "women can't play chess" doesn't mean girls have the same access to chess resources that boys do.

It does though. Doesn't cost shit to buy a cheap chess set and play and there's no reason any person not senile would not support a female chess player.

adjl posted...

Compared to biological evolution, sure, but it's not that fast. Bear in mind that you're not talking about evolution in response to selective pressure being applied, you're talking about evolution in response to selective pressure being removed, which is generally going to be much slower because it lacks the pressure needed t drive the change.

There's selective pressure to not be a sexist turd. It's gotten so aggressive on that point that culturally we have an abundance of passive and submissive cuck boys. It's a strong pressure that's crushed any idea of acceptability long out of society.
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Imagine calling the US 3rd world and thinking it wins an argument. ROFL

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SunWuKung420 posted...

Imagine calling the US 3rd world and thinking it wins an argument. ROFL

No healthcare, unchecked mass slaughters, massive, public corruption, widespread moral decay. That's not first world.
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Kyuubi4269 posted...

I would expect basically anybody post 1960 to have no reason to mindlessly exclude girls from chess.

There was no reason pre-1960 either. There doesn't need to be a reason for something to be a social norm. Note also that we're not necessarily talking about exclusion so much as the absence of inclusive encouragement. There's virtually no culture of encouraging girls to play chess, contrary to what exists for boys. This isn't a conscious effort to leave them out, it's just an implicit bias that pervades most of society.

Quite simply, if I asked you to imagine a chess player (outside of the biasing context that is this topic), odds are you'd picture a dude. That's pretty normal, and that's the implicit bias we're talking about here. The notion of an avid girl chess player is just odd, and that attitude becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially when people like you point at the existing gender divide and declare that that is conclusive proof that girls just suck at chess and always will.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

There's selective pressure to not be a sexist turd.

Again, this isn't an overt thing. It's not even deliberate, a lot of the time. You don't get people pressuring people to not be sexist if they don't even notice it's happening.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

With kids with no prospects, yes. Notice how football players in the UK are almost exclusively mentally handicapped and can't string together a cohesive sentence in their native tongue.

So you accept that your initial premise (that is, "Nobody's encouraged to be a professional sportsman") is incorrect. Glad we're on the same page.

Side note: For somebody who constantly insists that your worth as a person is based entirely on how much money you make, you're being awfully condescending toward professionals who make more money in a year than you'll ever see. Just saiyan.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

No healthcare, unchecked mass slaughters, massive, public corruption, widespread moral decay. That's not first world.

More saliently, imagine reading "hockey parents" and thinking of the US first.

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I love that kyuubi thinks there are no hospitals, mass graves and kill squads wandering the streets in the US. Plus he thinks there is no corruption or moral decay in Britain. Man, his bubble is hilarious.

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I mean, the US health care system is indeed garbage. He's not wrong there.

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adjl posted...

I mean, the US health care system is indeed garbage. He's not wrong there.

He said no healthcare, not a terribly privatized system that threatens to bankrupt families in order to get help.

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There's no separation of men and women in darts.

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adjl posted...

There was no reason pre-1960 either. There doesn't need to be a reason for something to be a social norm.

The social norm is the reason.

adjl posted...

Note also that we're not necessarily talking about exclusion so much as the absence of inclusive encouragement.

If you need encouragement to do something you've got potential in, you probably were never going to be any good to begin with.

adjl posted...

There's virtually no culture of encouraging girls to play chess, contrary to what exists for boys. This isn't a conscious effort to leave them out, it's just an implicit bias that pervades most of society.

There is not a culture of inducting boys in to Chess lol

If women don't join the culture willingly then there's none to encourage other women, and so women aren't invited as they aren't part of a social circle that engages with Chess.

adjl posted...

Quite simply, if I asked you to imagine a chess player (outside of the biasing context that is this topic), odds are you'd picture a dude.

I picture a board, you bigot! Also men picture men in any situation as that's what they are. The base image of a generic person is a mirror of self as you are your own metric of standard.

adjl posted...

that attitude becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially when people like you point at the existing gender divide and declare that that is conclusive proof that girls just suck at chess and always will.

Women won't dominate in basically any field because men occupy all extremes. Women can still play, but they'll never be notably top level competitive.

adjl posted...

So you accept that your initial premise (that is, "Nobody's encouraged to be a professional sportsman") is incorrect. Glad we're on the same page.

Semantics. It's just letting a lost cause not lose hope, there's no expectation of competence.
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SunWuKung420 posted...

I love that kyuubi thinks there are no hospitals, mass graves and kill squads wandering the streets in the US. Plus he thinks there is no corruption or moral decay in Britain. Man, his bubble is hilarious.

$5k ambulance rides, school shooters, Trump president.

The US is the epitome of a dystopia.

SunWuKung420 posted...

He said no healthcare, not a terribly privatized system that threatens to bankrupt families in order to get help.

I said no healthcare, not no health industry. There is no care.
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T0ffee posted...

Lol the sheer fucking irony of a tl;dr coming from PO of all people.

Congratulations, you got the joke.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Congratulations, you got the joke.

Thanks! I did my best.

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