What is the reason for the great chess divide?

My friend is an avid chess player. He has always been interested in playing chess for as long I have known him. He says that about 95% of the people he knows that play chess are men and only about 5% are women. If their were more women chess players, I think he would have found them. Why are women no attracted to playing chess?|||As teacher of kids in chess I've seen it too often.





As kids they are 50-50, then hit puberty.





The boys stay on, but the girls discover boys. For some reason girls think that success is "unfeminine." That and they think if they beat a boy that boy will not like them.





I've told them that boys don't care. In fact a girl that tries to play and does it well is impressive and attracts more than just from the waist down.





No effect As a guy I obviously do not know how guys think.:)|||"Reuben Fine was a prominent chess-player during the thirties, who competed in the famous AVRO tournament of 1938. He also had considerable experience in psychoanalysis, and in 1956 the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis published his work, The Psychology of the Chess Player. The book gives a very Freudian account of the game of chess, and is useful only to demonstrate the advances that have been made in the realm of psychology with respect to chess within the past forty years.





Fine claimed that chess is a substitute for war. The king is held to represent the father, while the queen is the mother. In addition, the rook, bishop, knight and pawn are taken to be phallic symbols.8 Fine draws a lot of significance from the fact that promoted pawns may become any other piece except for the king/father. This restriction implies to Fine that chess-playing boys are discouraged from growing up to be like their fathers. Unfortunately Fine's analysis suffers from its entirely armchair nature. There are no experiments or observations, other than a few biographies of well-known grandmasters to support the hypotheses presented in the book. One consistency in Fine's work is that master chess players all have differing personalities and backgrounds"








this was an article on Reuben Fine the number 2 player in the world in the 40s he retired to become a psychologist basically he says the king is the father and the goal of the game is to checkmate (kill) your father so you can have your mother all to yourself this is called oedipus complex


a term created from freud. Obviously females do not fall under this catagory so if freud ddnt have a screw loose (wich is till this day up to debate) than that could be a possible explanation|||This answer contains several gross over generalizations. I have tried to use the words "many" and "tend" so as to not brush with quite such a broad stroke.





Consider the history of the world for a second. Until quite recently (in relative terms), women were considered "inferior" to men, and therefore "unworthy" of using their brains for any substantive task. Times have changed, and there are now, in fact, some female chess Grandmasters, probably with Judit Polgar as among the most well known today. Still, there currently exists separate titles for women from men even within chess, assuming that women only play women and men only play men, an assumption Polgar is particularly not fond of given the equality question we are talking about here. (She earned her title playing exclusively against other men.) WGM (for woman grandmaster), WFM (for woman FIDE master), and WIM (not sure what the I stands for....International, maybe?, but anyway, it's a title given to somebody who has not yet competed in and scored well enough in an appropriate number of "norms", i.e., very strong chess tournaments) are titles which are in use in the chess world with reference to women (as opposed to GM, FM, and IM respectively).





Anyway, to answer your question, my guess is that even today, many women feel that following in the path of a thinking and strategising game is something they would rather not pursue. Women tend to be more "feeling" oriented while men tend to be more "action" and "competition" oriented. If "winning" might mean hurting somebody else's feelings, I suppose that could be a significant hindrance to women wishing to pursue playing chess for fear of winning and therefore hurting somebody's feelings.





This is all pure conjecture on my part, and what do I know since I'm a guy anyway. I still hope my thoughts are useful.|||Because it doesn't involve shoe shopping!|||women don't play because your not allowed to talk