What chess taught me about the differences between men and women

It's not simply about biology, or psychology, or culture, so what is it about?

I rarely write about chess these days, and my Substack subscribers may not know that I am a chess Grandmaster and was the British Chess Champion for three consecutive years from 2004-2006. The essay that follows is an extract from pages 70-77 of my chess memoir, The Moves that Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life, published by Bloomsbury in 2019. I am sharing this extract now because the issue of why men and women appear to differ in their aptitude for chess keeps coming up, and I hope these reflections help to deepen the discussion (and encourage a few of you to buy the book…). The most recent flareup is the banning of transgendered women players from female-only events, but more generally the non-chess-playing public seems unaware that men and women often play separate events, and often wonder why they do. Some men are quick to try to explain, often with explanations that are inadequate. On the other hand, I find some women are too quick to explain the issue away, which is also unhelpful. The full picture is altogether more interesting. In essence, I believe men and women are different, and these differences are reflected in chess aptitude, but the nature, meaning, and implications of these differences should not be decided by men. Moreover, far from revealing that men are more intelligent; if anything, chess may reveal that women are wiser.

The question of how men and women differ and why it matters is too big to address comprehensively here. However, since chess is associated with intelligence, and since we struggle to speak constructively about how men and women differ in their interests and aptitude and barriers to full participation in all aspects of life, grappling with what we know about women in chess is prismatic for the quality of our public conversation.

To put the premise forthrightly, in general women do not appear to like chess as much as men, and do not seem to be as good. For instance, on the rating lists of most countries, only 2–8 per cent of players are female, and there is rarely more than one active female player in the world's top one hundred players. A similar male preponderance applies in mathematics, physics and engineering too, though notably not in life sciences.

Chess players speak of the importance of ‘keeping the tension’ in certain positions, allowing the complexity of the position to breathe even when it is hard to handle, because we lose resources and squander opportunities if we simplify matters too quickly. The need to keep the tension applies here too. People are inclined to say ‘Men are just better at X’ or ‘Women are more interested in Y’ or ‘Our brains are different’ on the one hand; or ‘You cannot generalise’ and ‘It’s all socially constructed and political’ on the other, all of which is partly true.

The overarching view I have come to is this: men and women are different, but the nature, meaning and implications of those differences should not be decided by men. Biology matters, but in a human context biology is never just biological, because what biology means is typically social, cultural, political and historical in nature. Facing up to that conundrum is tense, as a complex chess position is tense; it is not clear what should happen next, nor how we can simplify matters.

When I look at recent public debates by leading academics in the field, for instance between Cordelia Fine, the author of Delusions of Gender, who understands the neuroscience but emphasises social construction, and Simon Baron-Cohen, author of The Essential Difference, who understands the social construction but emphasises the neuroscience, I notice that their disagreements are mostly about finer points of methodology rather than world views. Fine puts it dryly in her final word on one of their written exchanges in The Psychologist: ‘I hope that readers are not disappointed by the remarkable de-escalation in the Battle of the Sex Differences being staged for their entertainment.’ Hope for a richer discussion lies in realising that the gender question is fundamentally epistemic in nature; it’s about how we see, perceive and understand the world, and how diverse ways of knowing manifest in our capacity for societal flourishing or breakdown.

Getting the method and spirit of that conversation right is a formidable design challenge, because the issue is emotionally loaded and our sense of what is normal in public life has mostly been shaped by men, and that bias remains baked into our language and expectations. The task is to speak in good faith without being too worthy, to recognise power imbalances without becoming a crucible of victims and villains, and to offer insight that brings about a better integration of our public and private realms in a way that speaks to the major economic and political challenges of our time.

OK, but how?

One of my favourite facilitation techniques is the controlled explosion. Everyone begins the session by articulating all the words and arguments and stories and sources of evidence that really annoy them, and which they are likely to react to emotionally. The point is to purge the fuel for reactivity in the room, in a way that helps people to speak freely and listen deeply afterwards. We need this kind of approach because most related public discussions struggle with vested interests, unconscious biases and emotional reactivity taking over. The terms we use risk sounding coercive because of how they have been interpreted and deployed in the past. ‘Biological difference’ is a case in point, as is ‘time of the month’, ‘natural’ and ‘emotional’ – all terms for which we need a controlled explosion. Getting that kind of dross out of the way is essential.

The next controlled explosion would be about disarming truisms and detoxifying terminology. Men and women are alike in more ways than they are different, and they differ within their own sexes more than between them. While ‘man’ and ‘woman’ refer to relatively uncontroversial biological differences like men having greater upper body strength and women being able to bear children, male/masculine and female/feminine refer to sociocultural judgments about corresponding qualities of heart, mind and temperament, with related social expectations that vary historically and culturally. It should be noted that much of this language is currently in flux as social discourse expands, for example by integrating transgender and non-binary individuals’ reports of their experiences.

In that loaded context, William Blake’s celebrated line ‘to generalise is to be an idiot’ sounds right, and yet, by its own definition, it is an idiotic thing to say. We need in fact to welcome generalisations, but always on the shared understanding that they have qualifiers and exceptions.

My offering to one of the latter controlled explosions would be to admit that women have become so fundamental to my sense of self, quality of life and political hope that if I have a bias on the question of how men and women differ it is self-consciously in favour of women. This bias might be related to my formative years. I was mostly raised by a single mother, though I never thought of her as such because she was so good at building alliances. My mum kept our home life afloat, accruing and paying off debts of necessity and tending to tragic family illnesses while succeeding professionally and staying positive. Her spirit of joyful resilience stays with me.

I would also confess that becoming a father has changed my view of gender relations. Parenting is only one sphere of life, but it is prismatic for the issue at hand. I believe the main challenge for men having children is not so much becoming a father, but becoming a better husband (or partner) to a mother. The direct relationships with your children may well be joyous, however exacting the daily tasks may be, but your relationship with your partner is changed fundamentally in ways that are not always acknowledged publicly; more precisely, as different kinds of competence become evident, power relationships alter. Every family is different, but the fate of many men is to suddenly find they are co-parents with a mother who naturally, or so it can seem, assumes the role of primus inter pares – ‘first among equals’ at home.

Having responsibility for a household with children in a school community places both parents at the mercy of events. The challenge is not so much multitasking as adapting to new kinds of questions we have to ask a domestic ecosystem that is suddenly much more dynamic: What is there to eat? Not just for me, now, but for four of us, three times a day, for the whole week? Who needs my attention most at the moment and how can I best offer it? Should we rearrange those doctor’s appointments, and how do I establish which future dates are available for us? Why hasn’t the broken vacuum cleaner been collected for repair yet? Is there unfinished homework I need to know about? Should we have more coffees and arrange more play dates to keep the social pulse at school alive? What needs to be cleaned, ordered, sorted, paid, fixed or cancelled most urgently? Why is our eldest son waking up so early? And then there is a similar set of questions the next day, and so it goes on. I confess I often fail to ask such questions, but becoming a father has made me more aware of the social and emotional consequences of that failure.

Orchestrating this dynamic domestic context with grace is important and undervalued work, and it is unrelenting. Many men cannot handle the pressure and abscond one way or the other, either because they are incompetent or irresponsible, or just because they can. Women, however, are less likely to even feel that they have that option. I have spoken to many committed fathers who experience a similar realisation through co-parenting: women have qualities of heart and mind that we need more of in public and private spheres of life; those qualities are not just about multitasking but the disposition to view social, emotional and administrative responsibility as part of the main curriculum of life, rather than things to get out of the way before getting back to work or play. It is no revelation to say so, but it bears repeating: women sustain and renew the world every day with forms of skilled unpaid labour that are taken for granted by society.

With the controlled explosions out of the way, a helpful way to deepen the discussion is to think of humans as bio-psycho-socio-spiritual beings, in which distinct but related aspects of our nature are always influencing each other. To say that men and women are different is not merely to say they are biologically distinct and everything else is socially constructed, because you cannot separate those things so easily. Men and women are bio-psycho-socio-spiritually different in ways that we cannot easily discern without acknowledging and changing power relations; it’s not just that the issue is complex, it’s that how we describe it is charged with moral and political significance.

We are biological in the sense that our embodied minds have evolved with some species-specific needs and traits that influence how we think and what we prioritise. We have psychological depths and quirks because we are encultured over many generations, embedded in webs of value, meaning and purpose that transcends conscious reasoning and shape automatic behaviour. We are also deeply social, having evolved through and for social cooperation within small groups, and we are always influenced by relationships of some kind, including technologies that increasingly define and shape social life. And we are also ensouled, at least in the sense outlined by the atheist neuroscientist Nicholas Humphrey, who argues that humans live in ‘the soul niche’, where niche is an ecological term – the environment to which we are adapted: ‘Trout live in rivers, gorillas in forests, bedbugs in beds. Humans live in soul land.’ Humphrey adds that ‘soul land’ is a territory of the spirit, and that this is not only where humans live, but also where they give of their best.

With this fuller context, we can return to how the gender issue plays out in the chess world. From a bio-psycho-social-spiritual perspective the notion that women’s lower aptitude for chess is just biological ceases to make sense, but the claim that biology is not relevant at all looks equally foolish.

The contention that women are psychologically not as well suited to chess also feels mostly false. Perhaps the main counterpoint is Hungary’s Judit Polgar, who has defeated world champions and was ranked eighth in the world in 2005. Her example alone makes it look unlikely that there is any insuperable barrier to a woman being the best human player. That said, there is some lateral corroborating evidence to support the possibility that there are psychological differences in play. For instance, while men and women have the same average levels of IQ, there is greater variation in distributions in men. The psychometric measure of IQ is ‘what the tests test’ rather than reflecting the fuller societal notion of intelligence, but on this specific measure men are slightly more likely both to be intellectually challenged and more intellectually advanced; this could be obliquely relevant to male dominance at the highest levels of chess. Other lateral findings include men generally having greater spatial orientation, which might have some relevance to chess, as might relatively high levels of aggression. While some would view such findings as indicative, they could also be seen as overinterpreted, and they don’t prove anything decisive in the context.

The sociological explanation for gender differences in chess is more compelling but less than fully convincing. Male dominance emerged for historical reasons relating to who was encouraged to participate in social activities like chess, and then perpetuated itself through a vicious cycle of exclusion in which the lack of female players created a relatively unwelcoming culture for them, which was then reinforced by gender stereotypes and expectations. Due to these effects, the pool of talent became much smaller in early adolescence, as women felt relatively isolated and found other interests, and then statistically the chances of rising to the top were diminished.

This sociological account implies that given the opportunity, and with the culture changing accordingly, women would play as much as men and become as good. That idea chimes with a formidable body of research by the neuroscientist Lise Eliot showing how imperceptible differences between boys and girls become larger and entrenched through cultural reinforcement, when they might be eliminated entirely if cultural expectations were different.

If that were the whole truth, we would expect rating gaps to reduce as participation increases, and we don’t find that. Moreover, even if you consider a country like Georgia, where women’s chess is culturally valued and their participation is around 30 per cent of the total, you still don’t find the gaps in ability closing.  No doubt boys are supported and encouraged to play chess in ways that girls are not, but it looks like the game does not hold the same degree of interest, with the same amount of intensity, for reasons that are not merely sociological. Perhaps the most pertinent question ever asked on this matter is widely attributed to the anthropologist Margaret Mead: ‘Women could be just as good as men at chess, but why would they want to be?’

Chess takes a lot of time and energy for uncertain rewards. To get really good at chess you have to really care about the game, often to the exclusion of other things. And the question we don’t ask enough is: Why should you care? As George Steiner wrote, the enigma of chess is that it is both ‘fundamentally insignificant and enormously meaningful’. It is in these terms that I interpret Mead’s question: women could be just as good at chess as men, if they were willing to suspend their disbelief about what really matters. That they may be less inclined than men to do so could suggest that, from a bio-psycho perspective, men may be relatively predisposed to seek out meaning in the game of chess, while from a socio-spiritual perspective women may be relatively predisposed not to, perhaps because they have a superior grasp of its ultimate insignificance.

If this exegesis on women in chess seems elaborate, it is worth remembering what is at stake. Sexism is brutal and endemic in some places and subtle and pervasive in others. Unequal participation and achievement in chess is a small example within a much larger phenomenon that includes unequal opportunity and pay in the developed world, unequal access to education in the global south, and that’s before we mention widespread domestic violence and rape as a weapon of war. Any apparently innocent conversation about gender roles carries the heat and weight of those kinds of structural and actual violence, and any constructive conversation has to both address and transcend them. We need a more effective integration of our public and private realms and roles. As women and men begin to be able to talk about their differences in aptitude without coercion and with light rather than heat, our social norms could start to shift, including patterns of status, achievement and cultural reinforcement at a time when we need to move beyond status-seeking competition as our pre-eminent value. 

Getting this conversation right might be pivotal to how we reimagine society in a time of ecological crisis, where we need to adapt and transform our ways of living and knowing to survive. In that context, making better sense of the real rather than presumed differences between men and women is not just a parlour game: it is a frontier for a revitalised civilisation.

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Jonathan Rowson is a chess Grandmaster and was the British Chess Champion for three consecutive years from 2004-2006. This extract came from his chess memoir The Moves that Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life. (Bloomsbury 2019)