A long time ago now, I believe I asked how to increase the number of women playing Go. Somebody responded with something like: "well why do we want more women playing, why not more gays or blacks".
This is a reasonable question to pose. Women, most of us would agree, can be put off by walking into a club/tournament to see that there are 0 other women there. Since women are not a minority in the population, this is not obviously a natural state of affairs. Now it is not possible to tell somebody's sexual orientation at a glance, so it is unlikely that people are put off by this. (I have seen homophobic behaviour at tournaments though.) Minority ethnic races of your choice, I am sure there is an issue there in some places, but I don't know if the solutions should be the same.

What is the best way to positively discriminate? Some may still come back with a straight "No. Positive discrimination is never right."

To retain youth players, who are often classed as the future, we generally pamper with them with attention. Youth Championships. Youth prizes within tournaments. Teaching for kids. etc

Veterans are given special championship tournaments too sometimes. I have never seen a section prize for Veterans though. Weaker players, arbitrarily divided into some boundary by kyu or dan level, are given such prizes.

These 3 categories are never considered to be positive discrimination, at least I have not seen an example of anyone publically classing them as such.

When it comes to women, words like discrimination, sexism can be thrown into the debate. That this happens, is not at all unreasonable, and it is worth exploring.
Women's championships are seen by organisations as sexist, and banned. (Though some still allow Girl's titles.)
Pair Go is used as a tool to do the same job, I still find Pair Go as an organisation rather pejorative, but I think the majority see it as positive.
Female training sessions seem to be somewhere in the middle of acceptability.

Which of these 3 paths do you see as the best approach to try? Do you see it being genuinely tried as well? (For instance, is Pair Go in your country simply a charade to allow participation in a luxurious international event, or is it actually actively used for promotion.)

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North Lecale

Ladies night at the go center with drinks provided. lol

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

Which organizations are you talking about?

Some, but by no means all, national go organisations. I missed out the word some in my first post

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North Lecale

Why aren't there more women at beer-chugging contests? Something must be done about that too! It's just not right!! If 50.6% of the participants are not female, there must have been discrimination somewhere...somehow...

So I'm going to be distributing more beer to women. All in the name of equality.

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A few thoughts.

First, some people already seem to be pulling in their instincts about this from affirmative action in university admissions or government contracting. There are not a fixed number of places on KGS. Most tournament directors would be thrilled if two dozen extra people signed up, even if they wore skirts. Increasing the number of Go players in a certain demographic is not a zero-sum proposition.

Second, it's a question of multiple equilibria. I'm sure there is a self-sustaining equilibrium where 1% of Go players are female. At that equilibrium, there will be lots of haw-haw about getting the wimmenfolk all likkered up. There's probably also a self-sustaining equilibrium where 40% of Go players are female.

It took me a pretty long time to realize (and admit) that these issues are genuinely more complicated than most people realize. My personal inclination is to focus more on removing "barriers" or hindrances that may deter certain people from participation. But, admittedly, this may not always be enough. There are countless studies and books on this subject (just generally--not specific to go), and I won't pretend to understand all (or even most) of the issues.

I will note that classifications differ significantly and we should be careful about treating them interchangeably. Similarly, making over-generalizations is perhaps among the easiest ways to offend a large number of people.

I'm not taking much of a position on anything in this post (boring, I know), but rather advising sensitivity.

EDIT: I'm not saying anyone has been insensitive in this thread.

this bothers me as well and i would also like to see more women playing go, but when i think about it, i am inclined to believe this is a natural state of affairs. consider any other game or sport that can both men and women play / do. i suspect you will find a similar disproportion. possibly not so great, but go has a small overall population of players and as you pointed out, encountering few peers (other female players in this case) can be discouraging. i think that enlarging the pool of players would suffice in itself to rise the ratio of women players. and otherwise it is gonna be difficult

actually we could test this hypothesis by computing the ratios for various countries and see if larger populations have larger relative numbers of women. too bad EGD doesn't include gender

i realize that even larger percentages in larger populations (if i am correct) won't converge to 50%. i already touched this in the first paragraph - as i see it, the reason is that women are naturally less competitive, doesn't have so large desire to win and to fight for their place in the hierarchy, so they tend to prefer other categories of activites instead of games. it doesn't make me particularly happy, but i'll have to live with that

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Spilling gasoline feels good.

I might be wrong, but probably not.

Short of positive discrimination it would be a tremendous help already, if some people would keep their mouth shut, as exemplified by tchan and Joaz in this thread. Why this sudden urge to blurt out immature, male bonding, alcohol centered posts as soon as the topic of women in Go comes up?

Likely many players are perfectly comfortable with Go still being a predominantly male pastime and would see any change as a threat. Happily demographics can change despite that.

Board games attract a certain demographic.
Ball room dancing is notorious for not having enough men.
If you go to a gym you'll see a large proportion of the clients are women.
Flower arranging societies just can't get any male members for some reason. See here:

http://www.southmidlandsnafas.org.uk/contactus.html

It's not like playing Go is a invitation to an exclusive professional career. Women have choice and there are few barriers particularly with the internet.

Conclusion:
If you want to meet more women..then go to a gym.... If you want them to be interested in you.. don't talk about Go..

I'm a woman in go, and I can't say that I mind being one of the few. It makes me feel special and somehow different from the women who aren't there, and I like being a part of what I consider to be a "boy's club". However, If more women want to be involved that is fine with me and I welcome them. I do not, however, see why we should go out of our way to encourage women more than anyone else. Nobody put out a red carpet for me

I guess that sounds like I want them to claw their way up like I did. Maybe I do Of course up is relative. I am still a mere 8 kyu AGA.

Things are changing though for the better in terms of female involvement in go since I came on the scene in 1997 at my first tournament, which also happened to be the 13th U.S. Go Congress.

If you want to do more for women, do more for weak players. In the process you will be doing more for novice women players as well. I'm not saying women can't be strong players. We all know they can, but finding ways to acknowledge adult weaker players is a great way to grow the membership through retention, male and female alike.

If you do want to encourage women it would help to make activities as social as possible. I've noticed in my 15 years of being active in the go community, that the highest ratio of women is found at the Go Congress, where many may be non-playing spouses, but they are still there. Next come regular tournaments, and way down on the list is Workshops.

Having attended upwards of 30 workshops in my time, it is the rare occasion when I am not the only woman in attendance. I don't know what we can gather from that. Maybe women don't feel comfortable at workshops. By the way, I attended my first go workshop before I attended my first go tournament. I like workshops, go or otherwise.

Terri

On the other hand if they held a pro lecture series at the Congress for adult women only I'd be right there.

I don't really like the idea of female tournaments though.

Terri

Is the relative rarity of female go players (within the population of go players) considered a problem in Asia? In the western world, I think the relative rarity of go players (within the general population) is the main issue.

From anecdotal evidence, it would not be a stretch to conclude that it is more difficult to recruit female players. I would prefer that the leaders of western go societies focus on increasing the number of players in the most efficient way possible before they start worrying about male-to-female ratios.

What's the easiest way? Teach children, male and female. It might take 20~30 years, but it is probably the most efficient way to increase the population of female go players without sacrificing the growth of the entire player pool. Of course, many people are impatient and must have equal membership NOW and no later.

I'm not sure if it's possible to do things to "attract more women" (i.e., people are attracted to go or not, and that's a property of them and not something we can really change; all we can do is expose people to the game). I'm pretty sure, though, that we could *stop* doing things that *repel* women already interested in the game... Not all women are as tolerant as goddess.

Jokes targeted at or assuming an all-male audience are one example of a good thing to avoid. Acting like you've never met a woman before when one shows up at go club is another good thing to avoid. Unfortunately, this last bit is just sort of a symptom of the fact that the average go player is usually a little less than socially adept...

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

Indeed. Our society equally encourages male and female children to arrange flowers, yet when they turn 18, they just magically separate themselves.

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Occupy Babel!

It appears that a few people missed the point of my previous post, so I'm going to re-write without the sarcasm. And with a bit more detail.

In the last 50 years or so, in the midst of well-intentioned efforts to ensure equality of opportunity for various genders and races and other categories, a belief has arisen: that one can measure equality of opportunity by measuring equality of result. This has been accompanied by the corollary: that if the results are unequal, that there must have been some discrimination.

I'm all for equality of opportunity. But I think that the aforementioned belief and its corollary are fallacious. They presume that all parties want the same things. Whereas, in fact, all do not.
Women and men are different. They do not want exactly the same things. Whether this is due to genetics or environment or influences of the planets, I cannot say for sure. For whatever reason women do not seem to have as strong an interest in playing go as men do. They also do not seem to have as strong an interest in chugging beer.

Ultimately, it is kind of demeaning to women to tell them that they are not making the proper choices - that they are not choosing to play go enough, and that we must do something to correct that. It is paternalism of the most insidious sort. It sounds vaguely noble when we do it with go, so I offered the sarcastic parallel of beer to unmask the paternalism. I was offering the same type of 'positive discrimination' as the OP, only with a somewhat more boorish activity.

I say make the opportunities equal, and let women and men choose as they wish. If the results are unequal, it is because people are different.

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So your response to the suggestion that many women are put off even beginning to play the game in the first place, is to say they never wanted to play it in the first place?

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North Lecale

Tapir, where in my post did it specifically mention alcohol? You are making assumptions based on my response to how to encourage women with positive discrimination.
Ladies night can mean creatively pursuing all sorts of ideas to attracting female participants to the go center. Drinks provided can refer to milk, water and soft drinks without necessarily referring to alcohol. As soon as the topic of women in Go comes up, you yourself are making a sexist immature, male bonding, alcohol centered judgement based on your ideas of how to interpret my wordings.

Tapir, may I also remind you of the rules of the forum when you specifically mention tchan and Joaz as people who you would have prefered to keep their mouth shut:
1. Personal Attacks
Remember the Golden Rule: do to others what you would like to be done to you. Trolling, flaming, bashing, or otherwise verbally attacking anyone is not allowed. When writing about a move that a member made, ensure all criticism is directed towards the member's move rather than the member. Also, please consider that not every member in the forums is a native English speaker as you write your post.

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

Tchan, you're a mod, so you should really be above trolling. I find it very difficult to believe that you are familiar with the phrase "ladies night", and are aware that "ladies night" involves "free drinks", but did not know that actual ladies' nights are almost invariably at bars, lounges, or clubs, and the proffered drinks are alcoholic.

If you can't think positively about "ladies night" why would you think positively about discrimination?

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.