It's a lot less popular among women, isn't it? I've been playing for twenty years and faced dozens of male opponents, but never a woman.

On a related note, how popular is Go among women compared to men?

I think women mostly prefer men. But then I think most men prefer women to go.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

I'd have to agree that it is less popular among women, but so are a lot of things. I think part of the problem is that there is a stigma that only men can play games like chess. So many women seem to be intimidated by the thought of playing a game like chess or go. This has been painful for me, because I've wanted to improve the diversity of my university's go and chess club. It is sad to be a club of only white men. We have had a couple of female members attend regularly throughout the years, but never for more than one semester. The same is true of minority students.

That being said, I have played chess (and go) with many women.

The best female chess player I've ever faced is a Russian chess expert who is an international student at my university (1800 Elo according to the Russian Chess Federation). She is proof that you don't need to be a man to be skilled in a game like chess. And she was interested in learning go because one of her chess playing friends had learned it and was beating her. Sadly, she was too busy last semester and so I never got to play more than one game of go with her. She did find the time to handily beat me at club's chess tournament, though.

Also, at my university's cultural events where we teach go and shogi (and also often have chess), I tend to teach and play with about equal numbers of men and women. Of course, our university is about 65% women, so that's actually a bit low compared to what I should see.

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"You have to walk before you can run. Black 1 was a walking move.
I blushed inwardly to recall the ignorant thoughts that had gone through
my mind before, when I had not realized the true worth of Black 1."
-Kageyama Toshiro on proper moves

Nice avatar.

Just to reply to the question in your thread title:

Yes, often.

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

Of my 56 tournament opponents accd to egd, 11 were women.

Edit: duh, I thought you asked about Go.

I've only played chess with a handful of adults, but in elementary school when I played chess regularly I would occasionally play some other girls my age, though there were far more boys. Since starting Go, it's been about the same. Probably less than 10% of my over-the-board opponents have been female.

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We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

In school tournaments I played girls pretty regularly, but for females over 18 i think I played about 2 or 3 ever.

In go I played the same number of men and women in person, 0.

I learned chess from my mother, and almost exclusively played against her as a child.

I learned Go with my wife, and play her most frequently.

I suspect that's a slight anomaly though, the local go club is about 90% male.

I played against a few women in the chess community, but it wasn't a common occurrence. I hope that's changed a bit.

Jennifer Shahade, a former US women's champ, wrote a book about it: http://www.amazon.com/Chess-Bitch-Women ... 189008509X

In go, I've seen considerably more women, but we're still far from parity.

I suspect (but have no evidence to support), that the reason for the disparity in club attendance is the average social ineptitude of the men who attend, rather than any cultural disinclination to play.

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

I believe it's more due to the fact that less women likes games. In general. Most of the games have an overrepresentation of males, and I doubt this trend is just due to the "social ineptitude" of men.

Men putting women off by being so happy to proclaim women as less intelligent / less capable of such games
Women having less general interest in those sorts of activities than men
Less peer attraction - a gender dominated sport is likely to attract more of the same gender from peer-recommendation and role models
Women being treated unpleasantly (even just being leered at) by men in gender dominated tournaments/events put off further participation

So many reasons that could theoretically explain some of it, probably a combination of all 4 plus another 10 I haven't thought of.

I always wonder though, does it matter? Unless there are women really wanting to play but not playing because they were treated so poorly for example, I don't get the issue...

I like to think of a game of go as a conversation. Some of my greatest experiences of the game were playing with people who did not speak English (You know, Brits and the like).

How interesting is a conversation when we limit our partners to those who share our experience?

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

Hahaha, yeah, we butchered this darn language!

Are we limiting it? Surely if we wish to enrich the conversation of life (Go is not the only game that has this sort of parallel), then perhaps we should take up more activities with a higher female participation rate (/ different primary language, fit other experienced partner of choice in here) rather than expecting them to pick up new hobbies just to enrich our lives? (yeah, yeah, provocatively worded unnecessarily, but you get the point )

It's alright, one day your grip on consonants will slip, and you will join the colonies in our melodious vowel fixation. We won't hold your prior indiscretions against you.

I recognize that my stated reason for female representation is self-serving. I also think everyone should learn go, that it's fun and that women will find it as rewarding as men do. But hey, self-serving reasons are propagating reasons.

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

To answer the topic, yes.

I my opinion, women (in general) are raised with a guilt ethic about 'wasting' time on things that have no practical purpose. That's why women tend to go more for craft-type hobbies, where you have something physical to show for your time.

I don't think it's possible to make studying Go or Chess seem practical.

Women are also very socially motivated, too, though. If there was a lot more social acceptance, if you could go to a party and tell your female friends, "I just made SDK!" and they knew what it meant and could have an actual conversation about it and be excited, game-playing among women would probably take a huge surge. Of course, it's pretty circular to say, if more women played, them more women would play. XD

We need some fabulously sexy role models (male and female) to promote Go and publicize it widely. That...is probably not going to happen.

(Disclaimer: all my personal opinion)

Hi Inkwolf, combining these two aspects reminds me of a knitting club at a coffee shop.
About 6 or 7 ladies were having a good time happily knitting and chatting.

Another factor: co-operation (sharing/gathering) v. competition (beating your opponent).

In your experience, Inkwolf, have you found that women in general are turned off by the competitive, anti-social nature of chess and Go,
where two people (guys, usually) stare at the board
for 1, 2, or even 3 or more hours in complete silence ?

Which reminds me of book clubs: lots of sharing, quite social.

Well, even some of the explanations you gave imply features of our culture that we would probably prefer not to have (for instance "Women being treated unpleasantly (even just being leered at) by men in gender dominated tournaments/events put off further participation", and "Men putting women off by being so happy to proclaim women as less intelligent / less capable of such games").

Maybe the percentage of women doesn't matter per se (though there is always the diversity argument), but it's probably cause to pause and consider how women are viewed and treated in our culture and figure out what we might want to do about it. One way to approach fixing the underlying issues is to promote diversity along with other strategies, since it prevents the reinforcement of problematic attitudes and behaviors by lessening the number of insular or male-dominated environments.

Yes, I will certainly agree that it pains me to see misogyny or extreme feminism that often can equate to the opposite. I'm not sure that in itself that would be sufficient to see an explosion of women playing chess or Go, as I suspect it is one of a large number of factors that influence their general lack of participation, but in itself it would be nice to see such behaviour gone.