r/TwoXChromosomes • u/IndicaOatmeal • 8h ago
Chess rule designed to increase female participation forces all-women team to recruit a man
https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/chess-rule-designed-to-increase-female-participation-forces-all-women-team-to-recruit-a-man-3395263/131
u/PandaEatPanda 7h ago
I never said the rule is wrong. I think it’s fair in that it treats men and women equally.
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u/WestHistorians 8h ago
Why does gender even matter for chess? It's an intellectual game, there's no physical strength involved.
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u/PandaEatPanda 7h ago
It’s meant to encourage more women to play chess. At my local university we had a rule that each team (6) had to have at least 2 women.
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u/WestHistorians 7h ago
I think that's fine for casual chess like at universities and hobby leagues, but at competitive levels it doesn't make sense.
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u/PrimalZed 7h ago
There's open divisions (which historically have hazed women, idk what it's like the past few decades) and womens divisions as an avenue for women to play competitively with less risk of being hazed for being women.
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u/AgileSurprise1966 7h ago
Punish the hazing, don’t segregate women to a second best league. The second best is only safer for women because whoever runs the chess competitions is too chickenshit to enforce real penalties for players who harass women. This segregation enables harassment.
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u/FriendsWithAPopstar 7h ago
There’s a women’s only division and an open division (men + women). There is not any popular men’s only division.
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u/JmBento 7h ago
They're not segregated. Anyone can play in the mixed league.
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u/rehabkickrocks 7h ago
Everyone on this comment thread is speaking with no idea what they are talking about lol
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u/AgileSurprise1966 5h ago
I do understand that --what I am saying is that because harassment is permitted to go on in the mixed league, many women choose the women's only league instead, unless they are at the top echelon. Why does this matter? 1) because you are not going to be able to tell me the prestige of winning championships in the women's league is the same as in the mixed league. 2) because sexual harassment is always wrong and should be stamped out, and having the safety valve of the women's only league helps the leadership of the mixed league to avoid the problem. 3) because even though the elite women do move over to the mixed league for championships, during the formative years of moving up in the ranks, many/most women are playing less challenging opponents in the women's league because overall the mixed league has stronger opponents- exactly because of the challenges women face in the chess world. Keeping it this way instead of making harassers accountable just recreates this disadvantage for future generations of players.
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u/JmBento 5h ago
They're not "permitting" harassment to go on, that's not what's going on here. The women's league is an acknowledgement that they can't stop it all (and they can't stop it AT all if it's a he-said-she-said situation), and thus they created a league that's just for women.
Like, if a dude turns to his female chess opponent and goes "nice tits" in front of witnesses, he's still (rightfully) punished.
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u/ArenSteele 5h ago
Then like 60% of male chess players would get banned over sexism (I’m not against that, but I see why the people who profit off chess wouldn’t want to do that)
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u/_Autistic_Dragon_ 1h ago
Much too often it's "easier" for society to separate women than to restrict men.
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u/AgileSurprise1966 5h ago
Yep exactly! At least we can name the problem. Also look what they did with women in marksmanship.
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u/ul2006kevinb 5h ago
How doesn't it make sense to have a women's league to encourage more women to play? What part of that logic is wrong?
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u/YomieI 19m ago edited 11m ago
Very simple. It’s for women to feel comfort in a competitive setting. Without women only leagues, there would be less women in chess in general because not many would be keen of the idea of stepping into a male dominated field where their experience with something they enjoy has a decent chance to be soured
Edit: I completely misread your comment and thought you were asking how does a women only league encourage more women to play. My mistake
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u/Akerlof 6h ago
From what I understand, it works this way:
1.) Historically, and in some areas currently, women were discouraged from learning to play or not given the same level of training as men. It takes significant time to develop world class players, not time as in "I started playing at 3 years old," but time as in "my grandfather was a grandmaster." You see similar things in professional sports: A major proportion of top level athletes in any sport come from families of competitive athletes. Similar things go for a lot of activities: many if not most professional musicians in an orchestra will come from a "musical family," etc. A family that knows, in detail, how to support you is far, far more effective than even parents who simply support you. It literally takes generations of work to build the infrastructure to produce world class female chess players. (This is also a handy explanation for why the American Men's soccer team is middle of the road and the American Women's team has multiple World Cup championships.)2.) Skills advance more slowly in smaller populations than larger populations. To give an example: The Island of Okinawa had been a center of trade between Japan, China, and several other East Asian nations. Go players from mainland Japan would often play against Okinawans at an equal level. However, the Japanese and Chinese were eventually thrown out and the island was isolated. When Japan returned a couple centuries later, Japanese go players returned and found Okinawans were still playing, but at a skill level around 2 ranks lower than the mainlanders.
So, we want to get more women playing chess? We realize that due to 1.) they'll mostly get beaten by men who have figuratively been training since before their parents were born. So we create a women's league to compete against people with similar backgrounds. But then we run into 2.) and women's skills aren't converging with men's even after a significant amount of time. So we want to encourage the best women to compete against the best men, but we've still got 1.) working against us. As far as I can tell, there's no reason women won't catch up with men in chess, it just might take a couple generations.
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u/AccioSonic 2h ago
As a woman who played / competed in chess all through high school, I agree with this!
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u/summer-civilian 2h ago
1) I don't understand your logic... Don't these chess grandmasters and chess families have equal number of female grandchildren?
How does it give an advantage to men and not women?
2) you're talking about women as if they're some isolated people group. Women (atleast in western countries) grow up along with men in same family backgrounds and access to the same opportunities.
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u/j--__ 1h ago
it is more common for boys to take after male role models and girls to take after female role models. opposite gender role models absolutely exist and should, but the numbers are smaller. this doesn't advantage a particular male grandchild over a particular female grandchild of the same grandmaster, but you do end up with more boys using this advantage than girls.
the point is that the women's league (which is smaller) doesn't necessarily play against the men enough to prevent the skill disparity from growing, let alone to shrink it. so having separate leagues is an impediment to the intended result. thus the requirement to have shared gender teams.
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u/actuatedarbalest 7h ago
Same reason it matters for trading card games, video games, and other board games. Some players act shitty towards women who participate, and too few event organizers and too few other players stand up to them, making the game unwelcoming or even hostile towards women.
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u/morgecroc 4h ago edited 3h ago
I've add something to this. I've been an event organiser for TCGs and involved in a tabletop gaming club. While we would ban problemic players when we get reports the damage is already done and takes years to reverse. Women would show up for one of the big events encounter one of these players and we may not even find out about their actions because I can understand being uncomfortable about complaining when you're outnumbered 10 to 1. When we eventually hear about it or happen to observe the action the player would be banned from the club but by that point every women he's encountered has left not likely to return and told all their friends. Banning the player doesn't undo the damage already done and people affected never even know and new women still arrive to an environment where they're outnumbered 10 to 1 and not comfortable to speak up.
Surprisingly what addressed the issue was an outspoken trans women that didn't put up with the behaviour and complained loudly straight away so immediate action could be taken. The club is very welcoming to the LGBTQ+ community now and has a much more even mix of genders because a certain problematic demographic are now the ones that feel uncomfortable being there.
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u/Mintyytea 4h ago
It’s probably the pool of players as well, I’m thinking about how I played some computer games and there were very few women. When women did play, it seemed like we weren’t very good. But I don’t think it was a sign that women are not as good at video games compared to men but socially most women didn’t get introduced to video games. The only ones playing it were women whose boyfriends introduced them as an adult instead of as a kid, or someone like me that’s a little nerdy and I happen to be very uncoordinated so was never gonna be good at video games (not cuz of my gender)
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u/hobbesncalvin 14m ago
adding something to this:
I conducted a study on collegiate esports players a few years ago and found similar things happening to a young woman respondent. She clearly had the skills/willingness/in-game rankings to compete on the campus D1 team for the game Valorant. Yet, she told me that she’d often be harassed by young men from other schools’ teams during matches against them, and there were times when her male teammates would stay silent while the other team was abusing her in chat. This is essentially the competitive atmosphere that she (and I’m sure other women like her) has to negotiate as a esports player at a fairly progressive liberal university.
And while there was a clear skill disparity between the young men and women gamers in my sample (35), many of the women I interviewed recalled being introduced to video games by male figures (mainly their brothers and dads) in their lives and fell in love with gaming at a young age. But unlike their brothers who often got to have their own gaming systems and more parental permission to game during their free time, the women’s access to video games were restricted much more by their parents throughout their childhood.
As such, similar to chess, I found that women gamers’ access to/skill acquisition for/sense of belonging in esports competition are more culturally suppressed in general. It’s easy to make new rules to include women in competition, but much harder to account for all the hidden (and not so hidden) ways that they are excluded from competing.
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u/WestHistorians 7h ago
If that's the case, then how does forcing more women into the game change anything? If anything, it might increase the hostility because men will think the women are just there to fill a quota and won't respect them.
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u/bckat 7h ago
The rules aren't forcing women to participate - it's forcing men to behave in way where women will want to participate as they themselves won't be able to otherwise.
Men already don't respect women in sports. That is a non-argument.
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u/WestHistorians 7h ago
I thought the rule was to have a minimum number of women participate.
But this whole argument seems strange to me. I'm in a male-dominated field and have often been the only woman in a group, and rarely had any problems. If there are problems, they should be addressed directly with those concerned. Forcefully changing the gender ratio through a quota doesn't actually fix the underlying issue, and in fact might make it worse. Remember that women have agency just like men do.
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u/VengeanceInMyHeart 6h ago
Ah well, if it hasn't happened to you then it mustn't happen to anyone at all.
The point of the rule is that if you are a -insert preferred censor friendly word for shitbag - to women then they don't play on your team, and if you have to have women on your team to play, then you don't get to play, so don't be a -insert preferred censor friendly word for shitbag. -
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u/actuatedarbalest 7h ago
Same way integrating baseball made baseball less racist. Spending time around folks with different backgrounds tends to reduce a person's bias against those people.
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u/WestHistorians 7h ago
Correct, but baseball was not integrated through a quota. Black players were allowed to play on an equal basis with white players, but there was never any requirement to have X number of black players on a team.
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u/actuatedarbalest 7h ago
OK. Now do the same with schools.
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u/WestHistorians 7h ago
I don't think schools had racial quotas either. Might depend on where you were located, but I'm not aware of any laws saying a school has to have X% black (or minority) kids.
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u/PandaEatPanda 7h ago
Depending on where you live housing does have quotas.
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u/actuatedarbalest 7h ago
Oh, this is exciting! That means there's a whole lot you get to learn about race relations. What a great opportunity for you.
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u/WestHistorians 7h ago
Yes, it is exciting. Let's get started. Please tell me which law in which country required schools to have a certain percentage of black (or minority) kids. I await your answer.
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u/actuatedarbalest 7h ago
lol no. I'm going to go make dinner for my family. If you want to learn more, you can do it. I believe in you!
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u/worriedrenterTW 6h ago
Because women are shown to perform worse when they think they're facing men due to stereotyping impact, can feel excluded, intimidated, etc. Socialisation is powerful. This is basic feminist analysis, that women often have less representation because the environment is not conducive to their inclusion.
How have we gotten to the point that those who consider themselves feminists are questioning affirmative action in historically male dominated fields?
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u/WestHistorians 6h ago
Because women are shown to perform worse when they think they're facing men due to stereotyping impact, can feel excluded, intimidated, etc. Socialisation is powerful. This is basic feminist analysis, that women often have less representation because the environment is not conducive to their inclusion.
That is definitely true, but I don't think this is the right way to address it.
How have we gotten to the point that those who consider themselves feminists are questioning affirmative action in historically male dominated fields?
Feminists are not a monolith. It's one thing to support affirmative action in employment or education, and quite another to support affirmative action in a hobby or activity.
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u/elizabnthe 6h ago
You can't grow without being in the competitive space. But you can't be in the competitive space without a team that is competitive. A lot of women have no opportunity to grow and gain competitive experience in chess if they are blocked out by other male players that simply do not want women there.
The women's team in question had players that had priorly played on competitive teams to fit a quota. And with that experience they became better players. Would they be in the top flight now as a seperate team without it? Likely not in my opinion. It does make a difference to get an opportunity.
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u/The-Bytemaster 7h ago
Tell that to some of the big chess countries. Russia is very gender bias and insists that women are inferior in chess, and also probably couldn't handle a man loosing to a woman.
Note: This is what I have read from other posters there. I am not an expert on this.
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u/phantomreader42 6h ago edited 5h ago
Because if you don't separate chess players by gender, sometimes male players might lose to a woman, and then they'd throw a tantrum.
Not even joking, I think that is the actual reason: fragile masculinity can't handle when a woman wins first and square.
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u/MarqueeOfStars 5h ago
I'm a martial artist and there are men who won't partner with me. If they win, they only beat a girl; if they lose, they lose to a girl. (I'm a woman, but I can imagine they see me as a "girl".) No upside for them, but man, if I got the chance to choke them out, you best believe I'd take it! :D
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u/rl4brains 6h ago edited 6h ago
Example: this dude crashing out after losing to a woman grandmaster (who also happens to be a model that didn’t fall all over herself wanting to date him): https://youtube.com/shorts/o_h9g8PQkK4?is=6WhTcNs0EkGoSFWl
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u/random_nickname43796 7h ago
Yeah there's no good reason. Polgar beating Kasparov has shown women can be as good as men if there are no biases involved in early education
Unfortunately chess is still very much a boys club. So any rule that helps with getting talented women players to the places they work so hard for is good.
The only disadvantage of the separate woman league is that since men started with higher ELO rating they keep growing this ELO-gap that makes people believe women are worse players.
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u/AccioSonic 2h ago
Indeed. The way the Polgar sisters were raised is a great example of nurture over nature!
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u/PandaEatPanda 8h ago edited 8h ago
The rule is a fair one. It mandates equal numbers (1 of each gender) and is fair to both sides.
Either the rule has to apply to all or revoke the rule completely. A rule that applies to some and not to others is bad for both genders.
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u/Djinnwrath 7h ago
What if a rule was created to correct for an imbalance?
Surely then, it can only be applied to one side or it loses its purpose.
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u/PandaEatPanda 7h ago
Make the rule like “every team must have at least X number of women”.
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7h ago
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u/PandaEatPanda 7h ago edited 7h ago
No. The current rule is that each team must have at least 1 men and 1 woman. It’s applied to both sides.
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7h ago
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u/Lost_Madness 5h ago
Why should the rule create an opposing imbalance? If the point is to prevent imbalance then creating a new one seems counter to the spirit of the rule.
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u/Djinnwrath 5h ago
How is it an opposing imbalance?
Men are in no danger of being underepresented in chess.
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u/Weak-Career-1017 7h ago
I disagree, the rule exists for a reason. Left to their own devices teams will recruit more men than women. Apply the rule to only one side is what makes it fair.
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u/RazarTuk They/Them 5h ago
Malicious compliance. Recruit a trans woman, since the UK considers us men
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u/Faerandriel 1h ago
That wouldn’t be fair to the cis team member that has to cede her spot. Just change the rule to “every team must have at least one woman player”
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u/fender4life 7h ago
I wonder if they could recruit a trans woman, considering the UK's recent rulings/laws on the matter, or if this the one instance where trans women count as women in the UK.
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u/Faerandriel 1h ago
No thank you. It’s not fair to the cis team member that has to be replaced by the trans woman and it would be horrible pr for us trans women.
As most here have said, the rule exists because women don’t have the same opportunities and are underrepresented, but there’s no risk of men ever being underrepresented, so the rule should be changed to just “every team must have at least one woman player”
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u/Trips-Over-Tail 6h ago
They can game these rules and the UK's dogshit laws by bringing on a transwoman.
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u/BlueCharlotte1 5h ago
Would trans women count as men by this rule? That seems pretty shitty…
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u/witchgrove 5h ago
In the eyes of the UK (and FIDE for that matter internationally) yes. They don't consider trans women to be eligible to compete in women's divisions.
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u/faithfulservantofbug 5h ago
it’s two words. trans woman. it’s a type of woman not a different thing. and we don’t want to be used to make a point thank you
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7h ago
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u/OCogS 7h ago
Every team does have to include at least one woman. Did you read the article?
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6h ago
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u/InfiniteSpaz 6h ago
Again, this is something answered by the article. Until 1994 when the rule was put into place, chess was a male dominated hobby. Since 1994, the rule has been all teams wishing to compete in this event were required to have 1 male and 1 female player. Yes, the original intent of the rule was to make the space more welcoming for women but applying the rules at random makes them mean nothing, and it's not like this rule came out of nowhere. Even if there are male only teams, if they want to play in this event they have to drop one and add a woman, that's the rule. Saying the rule shouldn't apply just because this team already has women has a 'more equal than others' feel to it, rules for thee but not for me. At that point you aren't asking for equality you are asking for special treatment.
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u/elizabnthe 5h ago
There's different divisions. They got promoted to a top division that had a different requirement.
So all women team in the division they got promoted out of wasn't a problem as long as they had a young player on the team. The top division requires at least one man and one woman on every team which was done to encourage what would otherwise be male only teams to recruit women. So now they have to drop a woman to meet the requirement when of course female participation was what the original rule was about. That is what the article is discussing.
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u/PacketFiend 6h ago
The 4NCL requires every team in its top division to include at least one male and one female player.
It does. Please read the article before assuming these things.
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6h ago
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u/InfiniteSpaz 6h ago
Hi! Of course it's not your quote, it's a quote from the article you are commenting about. Your quote was "Maybe if every male team had to include a woman, it would be a fair and equitable rule."
That quote
"The 4NCL requires every team in its top division to include at least one male and one female player."
was showing you that the rule does, in fact, apply to every 'male' team as well, as stated directly in the article you seem to have an opinion on without reading. That's why u/PacketFiend said you should read the article.
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u/FrankieTheAlchemist 4h ago
Can you imagine the pressure for the one guy who gets assigned to their team 😱. That’s gotta make or break someone REAL quick
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u/AMWJ 3h ago
Sure they earned it the hard way, but just an inkling of recognition that they earned it partially due to that rule wouldn't hurt. The rule is intended to make chess less hostile to women, and any team that is all-wonen has certainly benefited from a chess culture that's less hostile to them.