Gap between male and female players is getting wider each day

Alexandra kostenuik did very well last year by winning a lot of golds and prizes in the women's section, yet in the Airthings masters she is getting absolutely destroyed and it seems impossible for her to even get a draw. Can we conclude that with the increasing popularity of chess the gap between men and women is getting even wider? 

It's really disheartening to see how big the gap has actually become. Maybe chess's best chance to have a female world chess champion is for chess to drop out of popularity so that the most talented and hard working men don't join the game? Your thoughts on it?

Well this is exactly what i said a few months back in a post, but there's one more day to go.

I don’t know if the gap is gender based. When I think of the World’s Richest People, I think of Elon Musk. Bill Gates. Warren Buffet… etc… All men. But, I don’t think it is impossible for a woman to have made Windows or Tesla or an iPhone or Invested Well…

I just think the focus is in a different place for most women.

And for most men…

Obviously.

I am male, and I am not beating Magnus.

I am male and I am not beating Andrea Botez.


It’s not a gender issue. It’s a study and commitment issue.

Or a mentor (teacher) issue.

Not a gender issue.

Take a random 100,000,000 people, none of them, male or female can beat Magnus either.

Take 100% of the best chess players, male and female, they couldn’t beat Magnus at the World Championships either.

So it’s not a gender issue.

It’s a master of the game stomping everybody. 100% of men included!

this is just stupid. kosteniuk is not losing because she is a woman, she is losing because she is 2526 and four of her opponents are 2600+, nine are rated 2700+, and one is rated 2800+. of course she is going to be destroyed. any male similarly rated would also get destroyed. do not make this about gender. she was invited as a courtesy and it was brave of her to show up knowing that she would be destroyed

by the way, kosteniuk would beat the OP 100 games in a row blindfolded

If there's a gender gap in chess, it's probably due to similar reasons as there are in other STEM related activities and professions. The main one already having been mentioned: lack of role models, mentors and educational opportunities growing up. 

The recent article Coach of the Month: WIM Tijana Blagojevic shows how having strong role models and exposure from an early age can influence one's success in chess, or any other interest for that matter. Tijana's parents are both high ranking chess players. 

So if you want to be part of the change, encourage your daughters, nieces, sisters, mothers, partners and female friends to play too. 

It's kind of funny Kosteniuk is seen as one of the strongest female chess players at the moment, and was former womens champion, but she is getting destroyed by every single player in this tournament.

In fact her gender is the biggest advantage she has, because if she was a man no one would care about her career or achievements.

The best way to tell if male players are superior to female is a team match. But ELO difference between male and female players must be + or - 5.  If the male player have ELO difference of 50 and up, the female players will most likely lose.

kosteniuk is not even rated in the top 10 women chesscake. she is about 100 lower than goryachkina and about 150 lower than hou yifan who 10 years younger than kosteniuk but is busy being a college professor. kosteniuk was invited for the same reason that eric hansen was invited - they are both popular online personalities who will bring viewers. 

3 Points..

1. OFCOURSE she is lower rated and that's why she is losing, the question is why is this one of the best she has to offer? That's the question, she should be performing better considering how she dominated the field in 2021.

2. Neither goryachika nor yifan would have done much better. Yifan has a very bad score against almost every top player.

3. I am tired of hearing the "yifan talented but she busy" excuse. By that logic I am on the same boat. I am 1800 and only play one game per month with absolutely no study. Had i dedicated my whole life to chess i would have been 2800+ !!  .   You see how stupid this sounds? please don't dwell on "what ifs", the reality is that yifan would also have been crushed in this field

So Chess brah and chess bra? It's open season folks.

op seems very persistent on investigating or bringing up this gap to similar comments by ”realists” and white knights.

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/is-there-a-reason-why-female-chess-is-separated-from-mainstream-chess

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/when-will-we-see-a-female-world-chess-champion

kartikeya - i am sorry that you are tired of the hou yifan is busy excuse. she was just a few points short of 2700 when she decided that she would rather do something else with her life than be a chess player. her coaches begged her to drop out of university and study chess full time but she decided that there are more important things in life than pushing pieces of wood around a board. 

it is laughable that you say that you are in the same boat as hou yifan. she was a university student while at the same time being almost 2700. your online rating is almost 900 points below that so your FIDE would be at least 1100 lower. meanwhile magnus dropped out of high school. nakamura went to dickinson college for one year, decided that it was interfering with his chess, and dropped out. while in college his rating dropped to 2632, below that of hou yifan. he barely speaks in complete sentences and he has the vocabulary of a football player. he is an aging man-boy who attempts to stay cool with the kids by calling pawns juicers.

meanwhile, hou yifan was competing taking a full courseload of classes and then graduate level classes, and is now a professor at a university in china

so yes, you are EXACTLY like hou yifan.

I like how u ignored my other points... well anyway its pretty sad to see u clutching to straws in order to magnify hou yifan as a chess player.

Your nakamura example is a sad, sad attempt in this direction. So by that logic you are somehow trying to imply that hou yifan is a better and more talented chess player than nakamura and she would have been better than nakamura had she given it her all? I think u should read up on what saturation means. People have a "maximum" skill level beyond which they cannot push, hou has clearly saturated at her rating and no, she isn't "better" than nakamura in terms of talent.

Again, using your logic, if the smartest man in the history of the world, Nikola Tesla, had dedicated his life to chess then he would have been 3000+, thus we can conclude that tesla is the greatest chess player.... your reasoning is the same level as this.

Next, "moving wooden pieces around a board" is no more or less important than studying something. If moving pieces can make u millions of dollars then anyone would like to do it. Hou yifan is simply not good enough to compete at the very top level, she has saturated (she is aged 27 so she ain't getting better)

Next, your sad jabs at me are hilarious. I have also been the student of a good university while at the same time i also was winning rubik cube events. So i know how it is like to manage hobby with University but I am not blind, i am way behind the best rubik cubers and I know it and i would still be far, far behind Feliks Zemdegs even if i went full throttle.

For some reason hou yifan fans always claim that she would have been the best ever or something, she has clearly saturated her chess and cannot improve more. She is way too old now to be improving. Improvement only happens upto a certain age especially in chess. A 25 year old can't go full throttle and get from 2600 to 2800, that's not how it works.

Yo you’re a cuber? What’s your best time

My PB was a freak accident and i got very lucky... got a simple OLL and then skipped PLL, was 8.13 seconds. However my average is way worse at 12.4 seconds 

That’s really good, by best is like 30 seconds, I need to work on my last layer stuff

This has the same answer as to why fewer women participate professionally in sports. No role model growing up, adult women mostly prefer "safer" occupation (e.g teaching, being a nurse), and less tendency to take risks.

kortikaya your other points were not points. you just said that she should be performing better despite being rated on average a couple of hundred points lower than her opponenets which is dumb. your other point is others would have done just as bad which is just an assertion not a point and they would still be rated much lower than the field

your bashing of hou yifan is barely coherent. my point was not that she was better than nakamura, but that nakamura's rating went down when he was in college and when he left it went back up. but your rage obviously caused you to miss this. nakamura's peak rating when he was twenty was 2663. hou yifan's peak rating at twenty was 2662. at 21 she was at 2682 as a full time student and Nakamura at 21 was only 19 points higher as a full time chess player. their trajectories were nearly identical until she quit.

and i'm sure you are very proud of your ability to make the colors on each side of a cube the same. i still laugh at your claim that you could be anywhere near as accomplished as hou yifan. i laugh hard

So what is your point? you are claiming that yifan was doing better than nakamura so obviously you are asserting that she would have surpassed nakamura had she continued playing chess and you clearly have no idea about saturation point of a player.

I get it, you are the biggest yifan fan, but to claim that she has greater chess talent than someone like nakamura is just stupid. 

Infact we don't need to "debate" this, nakamura and yifan played a series of games in 2018, naka crushed her 26-2 (yes, 26-2)

While yifan is the best female player at the moment, she is still many light years behind the top players and she has beyond saturated, she was just never good enough.

EVEN IF we take your theory of her being better than nakamura talent wise to be true, she ultimately quit... one of the things which makes people champions is their passion, focus and tenacity... quitters are not counted as champions. EVEN IF your assertion of her being a better chess talent is assumed to be true (it's not, naka has way more talent), she still lacked the determination and focus to make it big, therefore she still remains miles behind the top players

in 2018 nakamura had been playing chess full time for a couple of years and hou yifan was in graduate school about to complete her doctorate. there is no evidence to support your claim that nakamura had more talent. their progression was the same until she decided to focus on studies.

you are not making any substantive points that i have already not admitted to. she did not lack determination and focus, she used her determination and focus on studying to get a phd not chess. now she is a college professor and nakamura is a streamer who calls pawns juicers and lavishes praise upon xQc.

you might be good at making the colors on the sides of cubes the same but you are not very good at making coherent arguments

All women and men have different ways of thought in chess the gap will be bigger through the years of chess so much women and men may not compete against each again in the future of chess. (My grammar may not be right I’m only child)