Curious as to what the justification is for having gendered chess categories in the first place, because literally the only thing I can think of ultimately amounts to they believe women are innately stupid.
@stavvers
I'd like to know what the situation is with other mind sports such as Carcassonne, MTG, Scrabble, Contract Bridge, Go, Xiangqi, and Poker.
@floppyplopper @stavvers seems similar in most of those: mostly open contests, mostly men participating therefore most at the top level are men, occasional women's-only events.
@ech @floppyplopper @stavvers
For Go, it's similar -- Open tournaments and titles wherein men and women participate, and a few women-only tournaments and titles (like "Woman Honinbo") with generally lower prestige and pay. When I looked a few years ago, I did not find hard numbers, but it seems like [as of 2016] only about 13% of professional players were women (due to, I'm sure, the structural sexism and tacit discouragement aimed at girls and women who take an interest in Go).
1/
@ech @floppyplopper @stavvers
I know that Seattle Go Center has wrestled with how to recruit a more diverse population of Go players. Recently, they began a series of "Women's+ Nights" to be more explicitly welcoming to non-cis-male people. (Well behaved cis-men could attend, and were asked to bring someone who was not a cis-male, so they could be introduced to the game.)
2/
@ech @floppyplopper @stavvers
The traditional ranking system for Go tops out at "9 dan". Last I heard, two women had achieved that rank (Rui Naiwei and Feng Yun). So (if the numbers I just searched are right), something like 1% of 9-dan players are women.
3/ I don't know where I'm going with this, so... I just stop.
@mmlvx @ech @stavvers
that's really interesting that the ratio is so close the the ratio of male:female professional players in chess. I think of the games listed Go is most similar to chess in that it (for some people) is used as a proxy for human intelligence. Unlike chess it's never been claimed by a superpower as an emblem of their supposed superiority. I also think Go has the problem that extraordinary time, effort and finance is required to bridge the gap between good hobbyist and semi-pro, further excluding women from becoming professionals.
@floppyplopper @ech @stavvers
I'd disagree a little on the "never claimed by a superpower" bit. Based on some stuff I've read over the years, in the run-up to World War 2, some elements in Japan may have taken their dominance of the Go world as evidence of Japanese racial superiority (never mind that they'd had some 300 years of gov't-subsidized Go schools); and I've read (only a few!) similar arguments about Go "proving" Chinese cultural superiority. But I agree with the rest.
@floppyplopper @ech @stavvers
Yw. On a tangent, I recently learned that, basically, the methodical study of statistics was invented for racist reasons. I'm still having trouble dealing with that emotionally. But I guess people with existing assumptions will grasp at any shred of evidence, hoping to justify their counterfactual beliefs.
@ech @stavvers
damn, some really interesting toots just vanished as I was trying to star them.