Why are there so few women GMs?

why should we assume that on average male and female brains process chess identically?"

I don't think anyone holds that assumption. I think a more pertinent question might be that if men and women do process (chess) information differently, does that difference matter?  Maybe it does... or maybe it doesn't.

"I think that statistically, men and women have marked differences in their aptitudes "

I think this is true when such aptitudes are measured later in life but less true when measured in children. I beleive you'll discover that at the elementary school level, girls on the average show an aptitude for chess at least equal to that of boys.  Since aptitude is generally considered something hard-wired into us, I would think that it would be evident in any age level, but it seems that girls on the average tend to become comparatively less apt the older they get.

The theory that parents discourage their girl children from intellectual pursuits sounds completely bogus. Certainly not in the United States in the 21st century.

Girls get better grades in school than boys. If parents were encouraging boys to be intellectual and not girls, we'd see the opposite pattern.

Girls are also more likely to attend college than boys. Once again, more evidence that there's no parental discrimination against girls.

Once again, I point out that supposedly-masculine mental activities such as science, math, computer programming, and chess, are not inherently masculine. They don't require big muscles. Boys who do well at these subjects are not even though of very highly, they are thought of as nerds and not cool. If anything, there's more stigma against boys who do these things than there is against girls.

Why can't you just accept the obvious, that girls' mental talents are, on average, not as chess-oriented as boys'?  

I wonder if "hard wired" is the right metaphor to use in this case. The human brain isn't really hard-wired for anything; even our ingrained insticts and tendencies change as we mature. Is it not reasonable to ask whether our ingrained tendencies change at different rates over time?

"Is it not reasonable to ask whether our ingrained tendencies change at different rates over time? "

Sure, that's reasonable.

Do they?

I don't know; that's why I'm not discounting it as a possibility.

I tend to agree with you that at least some of the difference is probably social, and has specifically to do with the desire (or lack thereof) to reach that level in chess. Even if we ignore the possibility of organic differences, society just doesn't reward women for this kind of achievement the way it does men. It will be interesting to see if any of this changes in the next few decades. Now all we need to do is keep this thread active until then.

 I don't buy into the "society doesn't reward women for chess achievement" argument. The Polgar sisters are fawned over like no male grandmasters of similar ability.

Being a male chess grandmaster doesn't seem to get you into an Ivy League school. Most chess grandmasters seem to go to state schools. Ivy League admissions committess reward athletic success much more than they reward chess success. There is absoutely no reward in American society for merely being a male grandmaster.

You're looking at a very narrow segment of society, and an equally narrow definition of reward. Yes, within the world of chess people are gaga for the Polgar sisters. Outside of that world there are a few great chess players who are household names, and none of them is called Polgar.

It's also worth pointing out that the way in which the chess world treats women might have a causal effect on their low representation. Did you follow that forum post a while ago about the most beautiful female player on this site? It creeped me out, and I'm male. If it had been about me I probably would have been terrified.

College admissions standards are hardly an accurate measure of how society as a whole rewards anyone for anything, particularly when the statistical sample is so small. Can you provide a list of all the women who have become GMs and then been accepted to Ivy League institutions? When you do, we can talk about the problems of post hoc reasoning.

I was shocked, SHOCKED, to discover some nerdy guy talking about who's the most beautiful female. Who knew that guys talked about that stuff?

This just shows you the low status of chess. If he were a football player instead of a chess player, he'd be having sex with beautiful females instead of writing about it on an internet forum. This just demonstrates why the argument that society rewards male chess players is so silly. Males play chess because they enjoy the game, DESPITE the fact that it's not respected. Females, on the other hand, don't seem to enjoy chess.

And how do you suppose that football players talk about girls in the football locker room? Any more respectful than chess players, do you think?

I think we're talking past each other. I maintained that we of the male dominated chess world are often disrespectful of the women in our midst, and that we might thereby be reducing the number of women who find chess appealing. Your response is not an argument against my contention; it is merely an acceptance of it, coupled with unnecessary sarcasm.

I don't even know how to respond to the rest of your comment. Are you living in an R rated version of Saved by the Bell?

 I think you'll find the main reason for the greater amounts of kings over queens is the way the hierarchy is defined.

The sexist view of why females don't really play much chess is most likely attributed to the ways in which the world saw the roles of the female.

Anyone who thinks its because there job is to make babies and/or bake is very short sighted and would undoubtedly be held back in life and chess by their grasp reality

 I read your arguments, I just don't think they make any sense. You think that the reason there are so few female chess players, and even fewer female GM-level chess players, is because society rewards male chess players and it doesn't reward female chess players. Then you added in an argument that women are turned off by chess because the "male chess world" is disrepectful to women.

I gave many examples of how male chess players are not rewarded, and then I pointed out the fawning over the Polgar sisters demonstrates that females are more rewarded than males for an equal level of chess-playing ability.

Guys writing about hot girls... that has nothing to do with chess. At any internet forum on any topic you will likely find some guy writing something like that. Futhermore, girls don't need the male chess world in order to play chess. All it takes to play chess are two girls and a chessboard. No males are needed.

Athletics is supposedly a male-thing, yet every high school has a whole bunch of female sports teams. Male locker-room behavior hasn't prevented females from playing sports and having their own locker rooms.

If you asked a girl in high school if she'd date a guy on the chess team, she'd probably say "ewwwwww!!!!!" But if you asked a guy in high school if he'd date a girl on the chess team, he'd ask "is she hot?" Guys don't care what girls do in their free time. Girls, on the other hand, care a lot about what guys do. Thus, there is great pressure on males to conform and be normal.

If girls had any natural interest in playing chess, none of this "male dominated chess world/society" stuff would stop them from playing. 

One night at the Marshall Chess Club I induced a woman Expert named Dolly to play a few games with me. As blitz is too fast for me, I think I talked her into ten minutes per side rather than five. Our games were very interesting, a knot of people gathered around us because our games were the most interesting thing going on at the time. I put up a good fight, but final result after a half-dozen games: Dolly 6, Me 0.

One thing I noticed about her play was her superb positional sense, her piece placement. I gave her some tactical problems, but that superb piece placement was always ready to thwart my plans and always came out on top.

Another time I played a young Russian lady in Atlanta. This was a much more equal matchup, and I managed to prevail in a series of games, but by a narrow margin, something like 3 1/2-2 1/2. She did not have Dolly's tactical skill and deadly accuracy, but she, too, had a wonderful positional skill and her placement of her pieces for maximum coordination was magnificent.

 I want to finish my post, which was interrupted by my wife, who thinks that any time I spend on anything related to chess is ridiculous.

 My limited experience against women players leads me to suspect that they may excell in positional sense whereas tactically they may have to work harder. This, of course, is contrary to the the example of the leading women players in the world, who tend to be slashing attackers. But the natural feminine capacity for pattern-making may translate into some deep chess; they are the sex, after all, who invented weaving and its designs, and pottery and all its designs, and whose tactile pattern-making in all handcraft media has filled the world with beauty for thousands of years. So I think the feminine may bring some capacities to chess superior to men, and this could bring about some interesting stylistic clashes, other things being equal.

By the way, there's an excellent young lady player on this site named Pocot who recently gave me a whale of a game, involving me in an endgame of thrilling complexity.

 That one sentence sums it all up.

"I read your arguments, I just don't think they make any sense. You think that the reason there are so few female chess players, and even fewer female GM-level chess players, is because society rewards male chess players and it doesn't reward female chess players."

You didn't read very carefully. I said that that was one possible factor.

"I gave many examples of how male chess players are not rewarded, and then I pointed out the fawning over the Polgar sisters demonstrates that females are more rewarded than males for an equal level of chess-playing ability."

False. You gave one unsubstantiated example (college admissions), and I explained why it was a bad one.

"Guys writing about hot girls... that has nothing to do with chess. At any internet forum on any topic you will likely find some guy writing something like that."

It creates an environment in which women are led to believe, perhaps correctly, that they are valued primarily as sex objects. This happens in all sorts of fields, and it's never a good thing. Quick, name the first female professional tennis player who pops into your head; if you're like most Americans, it's Anna Kournikova, who had an often mediocre athletic carreer but found fame as the sexy tennis chick.

"Futhermore, girls don't need the male chess world in order to play chess. All it takes to play chess are two girls and a chessboard. No males are needed."

The organized chess world is predominantly male. As long as women don't want to be a part of it, they can follow your idea. FIDE doesn't adjust your ELO rating for a game at home with your friends.

"Athletics is supposedly a male-thing, yet every high school has a whole bunch of female sports teams. Male locker-room behavior hasn't prevented females from playing sports and having their own locker rooms."

Did men and women play on coed teams and share locker rooms in your high school? That would be analogous to the situation in chess.

"If you asked a girl in high school if she'd date a guy on the chess team, she'd probably say "ewwwwww!!!!!" "

In my experience you are incorrect.

"But if you asked a guy in high school if he'd date a girl on the chess team, he'd ask "is she hot?" "

Depends on the guy. Many people associate chess with intelligence, and many men — especially men in academia and the professional world — are either repelled or intimidated by women whom they perceive to be smarter than themselves.

"Guys don't care what girls do in their free time. Girls, on the other hand, care a lot about what guys do. Thus, there is great pressure on males to conform and be normal."

American women are between five and ten times more likely to suffer from eating disorders than American men. If only someone would tell them that they were under no pressure to fit in.

"If girls had any natural interest in playing chess, none of this "male dominated chess world/society" stuff would stop them from playing."

"Natural interest"? Chess is a completely artificial concept.

because the women dont think 

"Are there so few women GM's because they are somehow biologically less able to play chess well"

I think there are so few men and women GM's because we all are somehow biologically less able to play chess well.