You only have to look at the statistics to see that physical differences are far from irrelevant. For whatever reason, female professionals are generally far fewer and weaker. The game is not devoid of context: my guess is that it has almost nothing to do with brain chemistry and everything to do with traditional men's and women's roles in China, Japan and Korea, and the fact that go is still a very male-dominated game. I'd guess that girls found the game less interesting than boys because it's male-dominated, that girls generally received less support than boys, and that strong female amateurs and female professionals experience social pressures and gender-based discrimination that their male counterparts don't. But what do I know. I'm guessing, and so is everyone else here who hasn't seen it!

Well, Joaz's conclusion was:



It's an infelicitous phrasing. Presumably he means something like "Well, there are differences between boy-fetus brains and girl-fetus brains; and men and women participate in Go at different rates; so maybe the former explains the latter." But these hypothesized differences are much harder to establish and translate into success at Go than corresponding differences in activities with much more egalitarian participation rates (in the example I used, tennis).

Yeah. It's impossible with our current knowledge to quantify the influence of biological differences and conditioning from birth. Presumably both of those have an influence but to speculate which is more relevant, well, if there is a neurobiologist around there he's welcome to try.

Possibly both play some role. Women are generally not encouraged to pick hobbies that involve lots of logical thinking and competition. Professional go is also ill suited if you plan to have a time-consuming hobby such as getting a husband and making children. I would be interested to know how many girls and boys in Korea are sent to go schools.