Discretionary Note: This post and topic is not meant to offend or make any generalizations, only to discuss the phenomenon at hand.

A thought crossed my mind a couple of days ago that I found odd.

Traditionally men and women have been separated in physical sports, with male teams and players playing at a higher level than their female counterparts. This can be attributed to the overall larger size, musculature, and evolutionary leanings toward athleticism that the male sex possesses.

But then why is it that men and women are also on different levels when it comes to mind sports? At the professional level the best male players usually have the upper hand over the best female players, this can be easily seen in both Go and chess, so much so that women often have their own divisions and tournaments. Why is this so?

The most crass answer is that men are smarter than women, but as can been seen in many schools and universities it is often the female sex that has better grades and a higher percentage attends higher education. Then why is it in mind sports that there is this gap in proficiency at the higher levels?

Is it societal pressures for women to pursue more traditionally feminine lifestyles? Perhaps in part but still there should have been some especially gifted players who despite resistance attained a higher level than their top male peers.

Is it that the male brain is more suited for the competitive and calculative nature of high level go and chess? I do not know.

Does anyone have any respectable thoughts on the matter?

Venus and Mars post 1 billion and ninety-something:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWv1VdDeoRY

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On Go proverbs:
"A fine Gotation is a diamond in the hand of a dan of wit and a pebble in the hand of a kyu" —Joseph Raux misquoted.

Sorry I didn't realize this is a repost. I have been a member of this board for a few years now and have not seen any similar post.

While the video was interesting I don't really see how it directly applies to the question at hand. Are you saying that women are more likely to be praised for their intelligence while men are more likely to be praised for their effort and therefore become better players?

I suspect that in general terms women are less likely to be interested in certain topics, less likely to be very obsessive when they are interested in those topics, and also are subject to various negative pressures encountered in very male-dominated environments.

Still, you'd think that a few would bubble up to the highest levels. I dunno!

Hi Subotai,

Your questions are all legitimate and reasonable, and they have been asked many times on this forum and elsewhere.

AFAIK, nobody knows the answer, which requires extensive research, which, again AFAIK, nobody has yet bothered to conduct.

If you want to know the answers, somebody needs to spend the time, money, and energy to do the correct research. Good luck.

But in the meanwhile it is fun to speculate.

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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).

Yes, like many other deceptively simple problems -- which I cannot list, per the TOA --
people derive a tremendous amount of pleasure (and other strong emotions) in trolling, arguing, and speculating.

Enjoy.

The author of Go Nation: Chinese Masculinities and the Game of Weiqi in China makes a pretty compelling argument for the differing social expectations for men and women playing a significant role in the gender differential at the top level of go. Until relatively recently, women didn't really have the opportunity to compete (and train) with men in the professional scene, and Go Nation shows that there are still significantly different social pressures on women playing the game (at least in China).

This doesn't rule out other factors, but I think we can't have a meaningful conversation about physiological differences until the social imbalance has had more time to even out. There are already a few women who can compete with the top echelon of male players; perhaps it will not be so long before we see one climb up the world rankings. Rui Naiwei has already proven that a women can win a major open tournament. We're still waiting for the first woman who can dominate the go scene for a period of time, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that development in my lifetime.

Here's food for thought:
maybe men are more competitive than women as a function of human mating behaviour.
As an example: Male birds that sing the most beautiful songs (or construct the sturdiest nests) have the best chances of getting laid.

In that sense, the male domination in highly competitive fields of contention may simply be the homo sapiens equivalent of this:


And no, obviously I'm not suggesting Bobby Fischer spent his teenage years studying Russian chess magazines in dusty rooms in order to get with chess-groupies..
Just like a peacock can't consciously decide whether or not to have a beautiful plumage, human males have that competitive drive ingrained in them by their biological ancestry.

Just an idea.

If you take a random 10% of Go players, the top 100 of these 10% will be weaker on average than the top 100 of the rest of the population. This may not explain everything, but before diving into venus & mars or east & west type of explanation, you definitely should account for the different size of player populations first and figure out whether any significant difference to be explained remains after that.

Gender roles in Asia.

But that's not even a sentence!

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

The internets.

You assume that intelligence is the major factor in both the go/chess competency and the academic results. I am not sure either is the case. Of course, intelligence is important, but not the only factor, by far.

For the record, I honestly think that where pure intelligence is concerned, women are at least equal to men, and very likely superior.

But in achieving academic results, equally important are traits like discipline, dedication, patience, perseverance, mental stamina, and so on. I would not be surprised if women have more of all that, either trhough upbringing or through nature, or both.

In "sporty" disciplines, such and Go and chess, maybe some other set of traits is more important. Killer instinct, will to win, need to be "dominant" over others - like in "comparing sizes" and stuff like that. Hunting and fighting requires more and deeper strategic thinking (both in 2D and in 3D) than than taking care of the house/cave and the baby, so this might be a factor as well why men are doing better in stuff involving strategy.

Historically, female bodies and minds are more tailored to nesting, nurturing, caring. Male bodies and minds are more tailored towards fighting, hunting. For females, being caring and considerate might be a good mental skills for survival, especially when they are mothers. For males, good mental skills for survival might be aggression and posturing. Looking at the caveman family units, this seems to have been the case.

There is a lot of this kind of "specialization" all over the animal kingdom, so it stands to reason that humans have it as well. And since our survival "super power"is our mind, it stands to reason that the minds will also be specialized and differ between the genders. Even if we don't really understand it. Yet.

What puzzles me is that there should be some outliers, even if not many. Well, maybe there are, but very few of them made it to Go.

I am not a psychologist, of course, so it might all be hogwash, but I would not be surprised if something along these lines were close to the truth.

PS>
Or maybe its just the raging hormones...

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

I get intimidated when I play against girls because in my experience they've all been very scary fighters.

I think it depends on how we define intelligence. Living in different cultures I have noticed there are in fact differences in whether or not someone is considered smart.

Regardless chess and go are "Mind" sports and therefore depend entirely on the mental processes of the individuals playing. Whether or not you consider the skills required to play go equate to intelligence is irrelevant.

I'll post a link to what I wrote elsewhere: viewtopic.php?p=186464#p186464.

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Occupy Babel!

When speaking about the top of the scale, the mean might not be meaningful.

Usual IQ-tests (in the west) are constructed in a way that women and men share the same mean-IQ of 100. "Women are as intelligent as men by definition". However, the variance is bigger on the mens side, so that more men are hyper intelligent (and extremely low-intelligent) than women. I don't know whether the cultural context has an impact on this finding. It's certainly true in the western context. However, I wasn't able to find a good explanation why this is so.

There might be a similar thing happening for go skills: the bigger variance makes it more likely for the champ to be a man.

Some women will bubble through, I'm sure though. Some made it to the top in other fields:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryam_Mirzakhani
Apart from getting the fields medal, she scored the perfect score in the mathematical olympiads (tied with 13 men, but top it is).

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If something sank it might be a treasure. And 2kyu advice is not necessarily Dan repertoire..

Men have only one X chromosome, so its effects are less mitigated?

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

very interesting ... as is tapir's post about statistics: