“Do women play worse chess than men?” asks SPIEGEL 22/2023. With Judit Polgár, only one woman has made it into the top ten in the world rankings, and no woman has yet become world champion. SPIEGEL quotes the mathematician Christian Hesse, professor in Stuttgart, himself a chess player and author of the beautiful booklet “Caution Thinking Trap”, that women and men have the same chess skills. According to DER SPIEGEL, Hesse justifies this with the normal distribution. There are 10 times as many chess players as there are women chess players, so the men are more represented in the extreme positions with the best and worst results.
The fact that 10 times as many men as women play chess has nothing to do with the topic of normal distribution. SPIEGEL does not write what Hesse meant by that. It is probably about the normal distribution of the performance values of men and women. To do this one would have to look at the mean values and scatter of the normal distributions, but Hesse naturally addresses an important point. But some people may also argue the other way around: the fact that there are 10 times as many chess players as women is an indication that women are less suitable for chess. It may not be possible to gauge the performance of women and men in chess from numbers like this alone. Finally, Hesse is quoted with studies on the mathematical talent of girls, which is probably more meaningful for such comparisons: “Many studies have refuted the fact that girls are said to be less capable of mathematics than boys.” Although it may be that they are nevertheless less interested in chess.
Be that as it may, here are a few statistics on the subject, combined with the caveat that I am an absolute layman when it comes to the subject: The performance of the players is measured using the “Elo number”. If you look at the German list of the best on the website of the German Chess Federation, the Elo number of the 100 best men is constantly above that of the 100 best women. The difference in the Elo rating between men and women tends to decrease with rank. At rank 100, it is currently 316, at rank 1 only 224. In the upper ranks, the gap decreases particularly quickly. There is also a difference in the Elo rating of 212 between rank 1 and rank 100 for men and 304 for women. Or reading coffee grounds?